I have searched for this but to no avail:

Why is it, when Bishop alerts Ripley and Hicks about the emergency venting, does this mean the whole site detonates???

What is emergency venting in the first place? It seems so obvious to all the characters and maybe its a stupid question but I always wondered that?

I think it was going to detonate because of the first attack from the aliens. It takes place where the dude tells them not to shoot anything because of the gas pipes. The gas leaked as they were firing at the aliens.
Don't know how emergency venting got activated.

I believe it's better explained in the Special Edition version of the film. The whole colony site is essentially a large nuclear reactor (as pointed out in an earlier scene between Ripley, Burke and Gorman) and was ruptured by the explosion of the ship. Now there's some sort of pressure build up that's going to cause LV-426 to go up.

I'm assuming that the emergency venting is automatically activated to keep the place from going up immediately.

I'm tired; maybe someone else can explain it better.

RagingBull pretty much got it. The emergency venting isn't causing the reactor to detonate, the emergency venting is occurring because the damage done to the reactor will eventually cause it to detonate. The venting is there to try and stall the meltdown.

The alien nest was under the primary heat exchanger, so all the firing must've ruptured the cooling system. The venting would be an emergency procedure to dump heat and avert a meltdown, but it was only a stop-gap so the colonists would have time to make repairs or get out of Dodge.

Damn, I thought this was going to be a discussion about stupid aliens, a much more interesting topic to me than a "Stupid question about the movie, ALIENS," which is what the thread should have been called so as not to confuse me.

Stupid Aliens = Building a nest inside a nuclear reactor.

this...

I thought it was the dropship crash/explosion that caused all the problems. I think Ripley asks if it's possible to reverse it, but Bishop says that the explosion caused too much overload. I assume the explosion he was referring to was the dropship.

Can someone post the same thread in the Politics section so we can have a REAL discussion please? kthxbye.

Same. This thread was a total cocktease.

OK, here's one. Why, in Signs, do the aliens invade a world which is covered in (and contains an atmosphere full of) the very thing that can kill them? It would be like humans deciding to invade a world made of methane with hydrochloric acid lakes.

Thank you, Suprmallet, for redeeming this thread.

....holy fuck he's right? WHY did they come here? Wha? It's like me eating a lot greasy shit but doing it anyway knowing that I"m not going to like taking that shit later cuz it's going to hurt. It doesn't make sense!

Because they're stupid aliens.

Next question.

Stupid aliens need our help most of all!

1) Maybe they had never encountered liquid water before.

2) Maybe it was only when water was at a certain temperature, or pressure, or mixed with air of a certain quality, or some other intangible (like faith) that it became dangerous to them.

3) Maybe we're the only other planet within trillions of light-years that has life, so we're on the short list to get invaded.

4) Maybe water fuels their systems and they're running out. (A planet covered in gasoline would be pretty inhospitable to us, yet quite worth the invasion.)

5) [dvdtalk] Maybe M. Night is a hack and cares only about the twist, plot be damned! [/dvdtalk]

+1

Nice!

If I had to guess, I would say perhaps they've never encountered H2O before so they wouldn't KNOW that it would hurt them until they got here. That wsa my reasoning.

Imaging you went to uncharted world 3.7, once you get there you discover that the oceans are toxic to you. Hey, it looked like water from orbit.

Indigenous people: Stupid alien, why would he come here knowing that our oceans are covered in acid?

Answer: We DIDN'T know.

Edit: Oh Hi, Numanoid! Didn't see you there!

The three most common elements in the Universe are hydrogen, helium, and oxygen. Helium being a nobel gas doesn't bond to anything, which means that molecules composed of hydrogen and oxygen are common. Really, really common. There is no way aliens could not know what water is or know that Earth is covered in it. The ideas of aliens coming to Earth for water is one of the most laughably stupid ideas ever used in science fiction -- they could stop in the Oort Cloud or Kuiper Belt and get more water than all of Earth's oceans without having to lift it out of a gravity well.

Aside from Sean's comments about the abundance of water in the universe, do you think a society would get advanced enough to cross light years of space, but not enough to ascertain the chemical composition of a liquid?

Stupid Aliens, Trix are for kids!

And can someone please tell my why in Starship Troopers they would send infantry down to the bug's planet? Why wouldn't they just send down an endless barrage of nuclear missiles until the entire planet was rendered lifeless?

that would be better answered in the "Stupid Humans Question" thread.

one of you should go start one. I'm too lazy to do so.