Bring up aliens and a lot of people will scoff. But not everyone is laughing. Around the turn of the century, 3.8 million people banded together in a real-time search for aliens -- with screensavers.

So, in that way, I’ve started to look at Alien: Earth as actually delivering on the promise of a title like Aliens. Instead of sending the xenomorph into the copy machine, there was an opportunity to ...