The Thing arrives to a post-Judgement Day world. Skynet recognizes it as a threat. Who would win?

there's no way to exterminate them on a molecular level, and given access to the world's remaining biomass they would create unimaginable monstrosities that burrow through the earth like a wormy apple and hide in the oceans until it's time to stampede.

In order for time travel to occur, the subject must be a living organism (or must be surrounded by living tissue) in order to generate the biolectrical field needed for the TDE to operate.
The Thing is an intelligent cancer that infects living tissue. Meaning that if Skynet sends a terminator back in time to destroy the Thing before it could expand, the Thing could infect the terminator and use it to travel back in time.

skynet just moves to mars and lets niggerthing have shitty earth

flame throwers seemed to do the job just fine.
skynet has access to plasma weaponry and nukes.

The Terminator is just an exosqueleton covered in tissue. The moment The Thing touches it the robot inside will tear itself apart and burn it.

>itself
*his skin

Assuming the Thing doesn't hack and reprogram the terminator, of course. Humans could do it, and the Thing is smart enough to build spacecraft.

Skynet. They can't assimilate metal and the lasers would kill them near instantly

The Thing demonstrated biological conversion abilities far beyond any mechanical manufacturing process, AI or otherwise. Skynet didn't even build the nukes it used to wipe out humanity, the Thing would outpace and overwhelm it by converting all earth's trees and sea life into radiation shielded cockroaches.

>In order for time travel to occur, the subject must be a living organism (or must be surrounded by living tissue)
Then why can the T1000 do it?

it happened to be 50 below outside, the thing picked a bad landing zone.

Flesh cocoon. They didn't show it in the movie because they thought it would confuse audiences, but it was in the screenplay, and it's in the novelization.

this

what's your point? skynet's plasma can burn through everything the Thing could shift into.
also would give away the small twist of arnie being a good guy this time

the thing built a flying saucer in an ice cave with scrap parts. if it had any amount of time it could probably just make an alien emp and kill sky net

then why couldnt it make an alien anti-kurt russel and win in the end

My problem with this scenario is the 'Skynet recognizes it as a threat" part.The Thing's greatest strength is its ability to hide itself inside other living organisms. If the Thing can manage to smuggle itself through a time machine, then Skynet may not recognize the Thing as a threat until it is too late.

it is an alien anti-kurt russel and it did win

attempting to
dont know if it was just freaking out
or making some IKEA off brand shit it remembered from larping as a super alien

Who says it wasn't Kurt Russel in the end?

the thing video game

I mean maybe but the more likely interpretation is that it has it's own internal intelligence and it chose to do it

Wwyd as skynet bros?
>put robot in plastic bag
>cover it with algae or some shit
>send like 100 of them
Or
>engineer a complicated and expensive human skin suit perfectly accentuated to a mass produced killer robots frame
>put this heavy R&D project on one terminator and only send that one

Is contradicted by the Dark Horse comic, which John Carpenter also said was canon.

The trailers gave away that Arnold was a good guy.

It couldn't send 100 robots because time travel is expensive (in terms of energy).

they already had the terminators because they were fighting the human resistance.

forgetting robots are just turbo autists
ran the numbers and came back higher probability one super hunk terminator would do the job

>skynet's plasma can burn through everything the Thing could shift into.
Skynet can't track far less target every molecule of Thing, the flamethrowers worked because the outside environment was little better than outer space.

This was literally to ensure skynet would not be erased from existence, and you are telling me that a hyper competent AI warlord cheaped out?
Not with perfect skin tho, they just had the shitty rubber stuff. But maybe you have a point it was useful elsewhere

Checked
Dumb as fuck considering it's existence is predicated on it's only terminator getting fucked up and it has to send more in the future, you're telling me an AI would make a rookie mistake like NOT going overkill when it's important?

no reese says first they had the rubber skin models were easy to spot and then it made the newer arnold versions

I might have to rewatch, I got the impression that they still didn't smell human, and that it was just a better deception. If they were using real human skin a dog wouldn't be able to smell the difference. That was the difference with the Arnie model, no?

Skynet doesn't have unlimited energy. If it only has enough energy to send one robot then it only sends one robot.

>send a bunch of robots back to the 1980s
>people start seeing random robots appearing which kill people
>the US government gets involved and sends in a bunch of three letter agency guys plus the military
>your whole plot is fucked and they probably figure out that the big AI that the evil corp is building is you

It's a stealth mission, I'd go with sending in Arnold.

youre asking what an insane super computer would do?
fuck if i know
besides, using your logic here, skynet was created by the robot being sent to the past
does the AI know this and makes sure it is created?
and its goal is the T2 story line?
the real answer is it doesnt matter as time travel is stupid and the only goal would be get money and fuck bitches
or it could just nuke everything on earth twice to just make sure

How much energy could it possibly take? Skynet has control of an inordinate amount of resources and energy generation
Also what if it did a bulk order of terminators in a single skin package? Like maybe 1 big one and two little warwick sized models and a few that just latch onto people and slit their wrists and stuff

Hard mode: Skynet vs the succubus villain from It Follows (assuming Terminators can fuck)

The thing would just immediately overtake all the humans that Skynet was murdering anyways, then Skynet would kill it too. How is this even a question?

Youve got a point w everything else but how is skynet insane?

>How much energy could time travel possibly take?

Intriguing (and refreshing!) thread, OP.

It would also overtake the cyborgs that Skynet was using to murder humans.

I don't know anything about that because I only watched the first three movies

to humans AI certainly is insane
unless youre part of DAVOS or a bug person

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its not explicit just that reese has a flashback and they catch a terminator with a dog. the dog could be smelling the metal or something off with the synthesized flesh

What about skynet is insane
Well skynet did it at least twice and isn't ruined as a result, not to mention some ragtag chucklefuck jihadis could send a guy back in time too. Can't be thst expensive really.

The Thing isn't Cell. It needs to eat to sustain itself and below a certain mass it's just fucked.

idk the kill all humans part

Fair enough. Do we see animals reacting ateangely to arnold though? I don't see how a full human skin would smell off to a dog. It would be shielding all the metal and machinery behind it.

Humans in their currenr state are the niggers of life though, skynet was abject purity, considering an AI is unburdened by reproduction.

We don't know how powerful the Thing is in its prime, or in potential.

The short story by Peter Watts toys with the idea that the Thing (in the movie) is a figment of a much larger Thing-empire. Calls itself 'ambassador' and everything. It's scared and losing mass/memory.

Imagine if the thing was an actual unified hive mind and not an "every thing for itself, aaaaa-" autistic biomass? Probably would have won.

could be what they're not smelling, lack of sweat glands or no butthole

hive mind is the most reddit concept in all of scifi

How would you defeat a hive-minded thing?

Also can Things recognize each other? Early in the movie it's assume that a majority of the crew are human because if not they would be attacked, but that might not be true. If they are perfect replications of their hosts then how could one detect another?

that story is retarded. the entire point is that the thing is a galactic interspecies level parasite