however, this would help with a lot of objection to evolution. Since genetic analysis should be showing (since our DNA still matches the original DNA) that we did not “evolve from monkeys” but rather that monkeys (and earthworms and everything else) evolves from us.
But of course the whole movies is based on this logic by the characters:
“Hey, here’s a bunch of ancient art that all seems to have the same 5 dots in it.”
“Cool, those must be stars and the tall people in the art must be aliens.”
“Double cool, and if those aliens were visiting us 3-6000 years ago they must have created us.”
Enter the old guy. “Triple cool. And if those aliens created us they must know how to give eternal life or at least much longer life. So I’ll fund a trillion dollar lark.”
"Quadruple cool. Since they created us on earth they must come from an earthlike planet, so we’ll just point at the earthlike moon that we somehow know exists around that distant planet in the one cluster of five stars in our galaxy that is within the error range of hand drawn cave star-charts.
“We’re here! Pentuple cool, since it has been working so far, we’ll just fly down to the surface of an Earth-sized moon and hope we stumple across something interesting.”
“Well, that kind of sucked and we’re mostly dead, but sextuple cool that you know how to fly me to the home world since studying ancient Earth languages has apparently taught you how to read alien spaceship user manuals.”
One thing is that since they did absolutely no mapping of the planet before going down (after all, they were surprised to find a mountain twice as big as Everest) we have no way of knowing that this is the Big Bald Aliens’ bioterrorism planet.
For all we know there is a thriving city of 16 billion Big Bald Aliens on the other side of the planet and this area has been quarantined for the last 2000 years since containment broke. And they watched all of the events unfold afraid to intercede and reintroduce the pathogen into their environment.
Yep, makes no sense whatsoever. Maybe the writers had some grand plan for the sequel to make this all clear as mud, but i somehow doubt it. I think the BBA at the end was underused, and their superior intellect vastly…um, ignored.
hmm. good point. did they ever mention how “big” this planet is? if i recall, they did not do a lifeform or structure scan a la something from Star Trek. Which, maybe, would have revealed worms and a sleeping bald giant in statis. It seems like they just dropped out of the clouds and stumbled on the pyramids. Which in retrospect is pretty fucking unlikely.
i just really, really, really wanted to LOVE PROMETHEUS. I don’t like that the movie is forcing me to ask myself all of these questions because it totally pulls me out of the artificial universe they’ve created.
It’s par for the course in a lot of filmed SF, though.
I’ve been amazed for years that Luke Skywalker managed to crash his X-wing on Dagobah right next to Yoda’s tree-house. What are the odds?
Here’s a fanwank: is it possible that LV-223 had a different purpose prior to become a bio-weapon testing location? Didn’t they conclude that the structure they found was terraforming? Maybe the cave art was telling us “In the distant future (hopefully after we’ve had time to add a breathable atmosphere), come live here.” But then an anti-human faction of Engineers said “Fuck that shit!” and took over the moon and started producing black goo. Or researching black goo. Or found life goo that their evil thoughts corrupted into black goo. Or they brought primitive humans from Earth who corrupted the black goo and made the Engineers change their minds about us.
Wasn’t it alluded to that the Engineers liked us but then started to hate us and want us killed like 2,000 years ago or something? It seems to be the case that LV-223 was originally concieved as something other than a place to store bio-weapons (why terraform it?).
Maybe it was originally a colony and the black goo killed everyone (kind of an Aliens callback) leading to the Engineers deciding to study it and transform it into a weapon (which is what the Weyland-Yutani corporation intended to do with the aliens in Aliens as well).
Where does it come from that it was a bio-weapon planet? OK it had black goo everywhere but who says it was a weapon? To me it’s just some kind of DNA aggregator with a purpose other than killing, one to create new diversity or something…
No-one’s yet mentioned all the black goo vases looking just like rows and rows of alien eggs. Obviously deliberate by the film makers but why?
I think the captain was correct in that it was military. The Engineer didn’t fight like a nerdy scientist, he fought the super-sized face-hugger and the humans, as if he had been trained to fight.
Soldiers and chemicals that alter DNA, sounds like bio-weapons plant to me.
Really high when Jedi magic is involved.
Technical question on the presence of water. The planet had a heavy cloud cover (and thus they could be surprised by a big mountain). They said the atmosphere was pretty Earth normal except for higher levels of CO2. It seemed to also be at a relatively Earth normal temperature. Ignoring the fact that the movie makes no indication it is aware that gravity can vary (and so we assume artificial gravity on ship in addition to FTL drives) it also appears to be roughly Earth normal gravity.
With that combination of atmosphere and temperature and gravity is there a candidate for what the clouds could be other than water? And if there is that much water cloud cover could there be no liquid water on the surface?
These are creatures being actively built/modified by nano-assemblers that can build stuff atom-by-atom; established by:
Opening scene where white baldy is dissolved by nanos, then they start building something else (which I assume becomes us)
In the giant head chamber, the black goo turns little wriggly worms into a large penis-vagina-cobra in the space of a few hours.
If you’ve got fast-working nano-assemblers, and a ready supply of carbon, oxygen etc, you don’t need food and digestion for the organisms to grow.
IMO, this offers an series-wide explanation not only for the rapid growth of the organisms in the movies, but also for their diversity and change across the short number of years between Prometheus and Alien, and maybe even for their ability to build apparently large populations of eggs and/or adult creatures with only limited resources.
Some of that goo apparently built a reasonably large squid-fetus inside of Noomi Rapace without, apparently, subtracting anything from her. It entered the size of sperm and left the size of a small cat.
Every other time it is in someone it is quite destructive to the host. But maybe it has a “Female Lead” exception in its programming.
That’s not really a massive problem, assuming she ate and drank in the interval (what was it, 10 hours?) between impregnation and diagnosis of alien pregnancy, and maybe contributed a pound or two of her own body mass (not all from one place).
I mean, I think the movie actually just ignored conservation of matter in this particular case, but it’s not a massive oversight.
Oh please. A tracking device that measures “micro changes in air density?” And apparently does so with such accuracy as to produce two distinct blips, one for the alien and one for the nearby Dallas? :dubious:
The same thing that kept the eggs in the original Alien viable after all that time.
