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The Thing is intelligent and can talk with the humans and the other way around. Communication should be really easy - when the Thing absorbs a human it gets all the knowledge it has - it could talk with the others - like saying: hey I wanna go home... can you help build my ship so i can get outta here?

There are so many possibilities: if the Thing absorbed other alien species then it definitely knows a lot of stuff so it could share its experiences with the humans, tell them it didn't mean harm, etc. It could help humans build spaceships so we could do interstellar travel.

This Thing could teach us a lot of "things"...

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    TheThing: <absorbs human>, TheThing: Hey, can you help me get home. Crew: Sure. END
    – Naib
    Commented Jan 28, 2018 at 11:15
  • They were making a movie, not a two-minute advertisement that's why.
    – Shreedhar
    Commented Jan 28, 2018 at 12:12
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    Have you met people? We kill what we don't understand or are afraid of.
    – Paulie_D
    Commented Jan 28, 2018 at 12:39
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    There's no way of knowing its motivations, but the fact that The Thing infiltrates by stealth, and never reveals itself after it has taken over a human host, suggest the creature is inherently malevolent, and not likely to be interested in discussion. In the short story the movie is based on (1938's "Who Goes There?" it is revealed the creature's escape plan was not leave the planet, but to escape the base and reach the populated outside world.
    – Helbent IV
    Commented Jan 28, 2018 at 13:48

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Humans DO try to talk with the thing.

In the original film version of Howard Hawk's "The Thing from Another World"(1951) the character of Dr. Carrington, played by Robert Cornthwaite, tries to convince the other men at the base that they should try to communicate with the thing and try to learn what they can from it. Watch this video from YouTube at 2:33 to see what happens when Dr. Carrington tries to communicate with the thing.

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  • They also talk to humans in Carpenter's flick although once their transformation is known, I think it is arguable that there is no point in chatting. It may, for example, not want to go home at all but sees all uninfected lifeforms as enemies (as indeed they probably are if they are intelligent and know its nature) or even sees itself a "liberator" -- it tries to save "lesser" creatures from themselves as colonizers on Earth rationalized their takeovers of, say, the Aztec empire -- by Christianizing them, they saved them from Hell.
    – releseabe
    Commented Jan 24, 2022 at 3:11

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