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It is never made clear if the ships in the Alien universe are capable of traveling at or above light speed. Wouldn't robotic or automated ships have been better-suited for such a long journey through space with cargo?

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  • A similar question has been asked and answered on SciFi SE.
    – FredH
    Jun 15, 2013 at 4:32
  • Your question about why take people at all has been answered here movies.stackexchange.com/questions/10456/…
    – Liath
    Mar 13, 2014 at 12:37
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    @Liath Yet that was a completely different mission. I guess a simple delivery job requires far less creative thinking (though the obvious out-of-universe answers from there still apply here, I agree).
    – Napoleon Wilson ♦
    Mar 13, 2014 at 18:40

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Yes, the ships are capable of speeds significantly above the speed of light. From in-movie clues this is fairly clear, e.g. from Alien dialog:

DALLAS: How far to Earth.

LAMBERT: Ten months.

Then later in the meeting they have:

DALLAS: Well, some of you may have figured out we're not home yet. We're only halfway there.

So the journey they are making is expected to take 20 months. A journey between stars below light speed would be years, decades or even longer. This isn't their 'local time' due to some relativistic effect of going at high sub light speeds, as Ellen Ripley is shocked when she finds that she slept for over 50 years between Alien and Aliens, and that her daughter had grown old and died.

In Aliens the Sulaco is dispatched LV-426 to investigate why the colonists had stopped communicating. Its clear its its to investigate and potentially rescue them ("its a bug hunt") and they find cocooned colonists, so its clear this is a fairly fast military ship.

I don't know where the information comes from, but the Alien v Preditor Wiki states that the speed of the Nostromo is 0.12 light years per day with its cargo.

As for the issue of automated ships being superior for such long voyages - this might be true, except that people are more adaptable and creative problem solvers - and putting your trust in people when you are ferrying huge quantities of (presumably expensive) mineral ore might be seen as a good investment, even if they require more infrastructure to keep them alive than automation or androids.

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    "people when you are ferrying huge quantities of (presumably expensive) mineral ore might be seen as a good investment" - But you still use only one android to ensure capture and transport of the alien lifeform you put over your crew, ore, and mining equipment?
    – Mario
    Jan 24, 2018 at 6:22
  • @Mario.... we don't know how much Android technology costs. They use a normal human crew for day to day operation of the ship and have a covert android as the ultimately loyal representative of the company for exceptional circumstances .. from crew death, to the crew stealing the ship to keeping a potentially useful alien alive.
    – iandotkelly ♦
    Jan 24, 2018 at 19:54
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Yes, either the ships can travel at theoretical speeds beyond that of light or they can enter and exit "warp" or "hyperspace" corridors which allow travel across vast areas of space in far less than time than traveling at or near light speed would. Some clues from the 19780 novelization of the film Alien and the subsequent Alien films are:

  1. In the novelization, the Nostromo's cargo is a refinery of petroleum which is still used for plastic on a future Earth. It isn't conceivable that an existing trade route would be established when cargo deliveries took centuries or millennia for delivery.
  2. Carter Burke makes the comment during Ripley's dream that her escape shuttle drifted outside of the space lanes, implying that there are normal travel routes through space in the Alien universe. This again would require FTL (faster than light) travel to even be possible.
  3. Burke tells Ripley that contact was lost the colonists on LV-426. Since normal communications with another planet would take years,decades or even centuries, it can be inferred that faster than light communication is possible. To believe in that, then faster than light travel also has to be possible.
  4. When Ripley asks Hicks how long it will be before they can expect rescue if they aren't heard me from he replies "Seventeen days." Given that the events of the film do not occur within the Sol system of planets, it can be inferred that some form of FTL is possible to make the journey in such a short period of time.
  5. In all of the Alien franchises, sentient alien life is not viewed to be unusual. Given the fact that no such life exists in the Sol system of planets, one can infer that that series occurs outside of this area. That would only be possible if FTL was/is possible in their universe.
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    FTL comms doesn't imply or require FTL travel. FTL communication is theoretically possible with a quantum entanglement. FTL travel is pure science fiction.
    – Coomie
    Jan 24, 2018 at 5:57
  • @Coomie Current quantum theory does not allow information to be communicated with quantum entanglement.
    – Acccumulation
    Jan 29, 2018 at 18:59
  • @Acccumulation It has been proved in 2020 that FTL comms can work. Chinese scientists teleported information from Beijing to a satellite seemingly instantly. –
    – Theodore R. Smith
    Oct 19, 2022 at 19:23
  • @TheodoreR.Smith No, it hasn't.
    – Acccumulation
    Oct 20, 2022 at 3:33
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Absolutely they go faster than light......I've been a big fan of the Alien films for 40 years. I remember reading the novelization in middle school......and I remember a part where Ripley describes the acceleration of the Nostromo and the effects when passing the speed of light. I think she said something to the affect of how the stars in front would turn blue and the stars in the rear would turn red... then a flash of light all around the ship....... Something that can be seen in the movie The Last Starfighter when the starcar first takes Alex Rogan off world.

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