system
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human
[Evolution, 2001 movie]In the movie The General is depicted to be a hot-headed idiot who almost destroys the world, did he actually save all life on planet Earth by accident? Does everyone die afterwards anyway?

For those who have not seen the movie, it concerns a small town where a meteoroid strikes within which is alien life that can evolve, reproduce and mutate extremely quickly. The alien life initially crashed into a cave complex and was semi contained there until some of it started getting out through a cave system and attacking the locals. What initially crashed were microbes, it later evolved into a variety of larger and more complex life including, right before the end, something that look like intelligent primates.

A military commander decides to deal with the situation by packing part of the cave complex full of napalm and igniting it. A local scientist says that this is a bad idea because heat energy causes the alien life to grow very rapidl. At the climax of the movie the napalm is set off and all of the alien life, or so it might appear, melts into a soup and then congeals into one giant single-celled organism which is then killed with a bomb made out of shampoo. The alien life is vulnerable to a chemical in shampoo.  Before the shampoo bomb blew it up, the cell was starting to divide and had it succeeded, the world would certainly have been destroyed. When the movie ends the general is shown to be a fool and the day is saved. I have two questions then.

1. Does everyone die off-screen a couple of weeks later anyway? If this stuff can evolve very rapidly and some of it had already escaped why is there any reason to imagine that all of it was absorbed into that giant single-celled creature?  From what we can see the cave complex had been destroyed but they had already made it into local community and that's not look like it was damaged at all.

2. If all of it was absorbed, then didn't the general actually save the world? I don't see any other way that all of the alien life, down to the very last cell, could have otherwise have been found and destroyed. It is only because he caused such rapid growth that he combined it into one bigger and easier to hit target. Didn't he actually save the world?

And if you have never saw it, this cinematic masterpiece is currently on Netflix.  This is the sort of very serious movie which deserves very serious consideration.
gpt
The giant monster being killed was just a proof-of-concept test of a biological weapon to use against the aliens.  As a bonus, it's a biological weapon that has already been extensively tested on humans and proven to be harmless.  While there will undoubtedly be some cleanup to do in the surrounding area, we now have a weapon that we can use to carpet bomb any affected region, quickly wiping out the alien threat.

The General's recklessness made things a little bit easier and provided the sense of urgency that forced agent Mulder to come up with a solution, but the military could have just as easily done it's own research, come up with the bioweapon idea, filled up the cave with pressurized shampoo bottles instead of napalm, and destroyed the infestation without the giant blob monster stage.