Engineer social politics

Disregarding your very last comments above, those are some interesting thoughts overall Windood, especially about the scenario of a 'division' of opinion amongst the actual 'Engineer' race itself. So many plausible possibilities have been brought up on this forum now by various people, that it will be interesting to see how satisfied the majority of us are with the ACTUAL storylines that the writers have come up with. Did you see some of the various expectations posted on this particular thread by the way? - [url=http://www.prometheus-movie.com/community/forums/topic/3423]Your text to link here...[/url]

That's a very interesting observation. However, I see your thesis at the other side of the spectrum. As any species progresses, because resources are limited, emotion and morality(however you define it) many times can stand in the way of scientific achievement and progress. I would assume that the space jockey civilization relies solely on science and mathematical certainty as primary dictum in society. Thus emotion and morality have long been eliminated by the evolutionary process. It would be interesting if the space jockey is not portrayed as evil but just so advanced that were infants/amoebas in evolution. It seems that David may be fond of the space jockey because of their logic that is also bestowed in his internal circuits and algorithms. Maybe David has to make a judgement call. He realizes the space jockey's intentions while evil, from the point of view of humans, are not evil but far more beneficial in the grand scheme of things. For instances, to progress in science, the limited resources of Earth have to be given to the space jockey. The sacrifice of humans, while tragic, is a calculated certainty given our history with war and should be given to a species that is more appreciative and more responsible.

Now that I like czelaya! Rather than the 'Engineers' having 'human'-like differences of 'morality' as suggested by Windood...they might turn out to be portrayed as totally single-minded (and possibly indifferent to our own feelings of 'morality' about certain things they get up to as a matter of 'normality' to them, when we find them)...and the artificially-created 'David' has to make a difficult 'choice' between helping out those who made him, or those who made the ones that made him in the grand scheme of things!... However, I reckon 'David' would 'side' with us in this movie, as he's been bestowed with enough technology to 'replicate' certain 'emotions' within him at the end of the day.

Hi Czelaya, i would disagree that resources are limited, maybe they are to us right now, but not to the race(s) in the period prometheus is set in. Any civilisation advanced enough for terraforming and bio-engineering is probably ok at procuring whatever resources are needed. From what i've read in other fields one of the things that holds us back is an emotional system which evolved under different circumstances than those we face today, and i would imagine exactly the same is true for whatever race the engineers are. I would doubt they had relied solely on science and mathematics or logic, the fact that they still have physical forms shows that to some extent they still value physical form, i doubt thats the most logical of things to do if all one values is logic. I would imagine the technologically advanced beings are not so alien to us when it comes to emotion, and probably have a variety of different types of people similar to ourselves.I would also imagine a better understanding of their place in the universe, and a totally different idea to ours as to the meaning of life. We ourselves cull and eradicate species without much thought as to the consequences pretty much. I'm wondering if RS and Lindelof has chosen Davids story to partially mirror the meaning of the journey of the prometheus. Weyland in the TEDs talk says 'we are the Gods', maybe David fuses Weylands DNA with his own somehow using the engineers technology. I would guess immortality/mortality, the relationship to the creator are going to be major themes of this movie. For humans, engineers, and droids.

i would imagine a Weyland product (David) would serve weylands needs over the needs of the crew, i'm still wondering if David maybe harvested an egg or something from Shaw when she was in cryo-sleep and has plans to creat life himself. He's had a long time to think about it while the others sleep on their long voyage to meet their creator.

I agree that it would be really interesting if the artifical-construct 'David' ends up having an 'agenda' of his own that potentially puts his human makers in danger, ultimately...

Hi Cervantes, it's been a long time since i watched Aliens and the next 2 films but if Ash was capable of going homicidal i wouldn't put nothing past an earlier model having even bigger issues. it would certainly tie in with Weyland looking for immortality, the creator/creation relationship. On a simpler level i can imagine David serving the more intelligent race, as if his programming wrongly assumed that would always be human, but that seems a little cheap to me, but would be arrogant maybe to get into a movie as a flaw of mankind. But i think it would be interesting if David saw the technology from the Gods as his way to have life beyong his own, Progeny...

If the engineers are advanced enough, EVERYTHING to them could be just the equivalent of an improvised tool. I the same way that "there's an app for that" in our early 21st century lives, they may simply synthesize organic machines [i]ad hoc[/i] for reasons that are absolutely impenetrable to us. We (and the xeno of [i]Alien[/i]) may be nothing more than a coat hanger bent at a convenient angle to them. We are evolved as a social species that must have love and morals in order for our concept of ”progress” to continue. I see no reason why the Engineers might necessarily understand our sense of morality (or even raw “good” and “evil”). However, they (and by extension their “society” too) are subject to entropy. Do we know that “Engineer 1” in the film is not a member of the Prometheus crew who has been adapted into a pilot?

it would be interesting for them to have set aside a technology to convert one of the prometheus crew into one of them, but would there be any point in doing so? I'd love to know more about what happens when people go through the portal, and also suspect the trailer may have been cut to deliberately send us all down the garden path with this one (hope so too)

[quote=Windood][i]it would be interesting for them to have set aside a technology to convert one of the prometheus crew into one of them, but would there be any point in doing so?[/i][/quote] Absolutely. It would be much less expensive to keep the genetic pattern of an Engineer alive (even in stasis) in something like David's “gray matter” than to keep a full being around in stasis. The planet looks (from the trailer) like it was thriving at some very distant point in the past. It had flowing water and plant life featuring photosynthesis. However, it’s degradation by the time Prometheus arrives is clear. Maybe two steps away from paralleling Mars. You can't grow something the size of the Engineer in the trailer out of “thin air-less-ness.” You need some “food” for a being of that size to consume to become that large (and presumably powerful). You can feed nutrient-rich material to something tiny and have it replicate cells and grow, or you can take something that is already pretty big, and transform the nature of its cells into something else. The latter has a great deal of potential to be maximally efficient. In the Xeno’s reproductive process the face-hugger threw away (wasted) virtually all of Kane. I doubt seriously that a similar process would be the [i]only[/i] one a very intelligent entity would have in place on an apparently organic-matter-starved planet like the one onto which Prometheus lands.

One last time: David is a machine. David does not possess DNA. David was manufactured, presumably by a mix of other robots and possibly Chinese folks. He is no more likely to "evolve" or "transform" than an iPhone is.

asn't that Gigers whole ethos in the designs for this, a biomechanical fusion? i don't think david has dna, but we don't know what technology the engineers have, but we know they can play about with living organisms at a level far in advance of anything we can imagine, we know we aren't going to see a xeno in this (just dna for it at best), and the motifs for this are the creation meeting the creator(s), and at least one, wanting the engineers technology. From the TED video i would say that is what the whole mission is funded by weyland for. He thought he was a god in 2023, so 60 years on and facing his own mortality (if he is still alive at that point) i imagine that would be why he would fund a modern day (albeit in the future) jesuit like mission. everything i've seen the cast say in the Q&A's, and there are many of them now, points towards the individual agendas each passenger has come to the fore as the film goes on. So i'd be surprised if David, our creation in our own image, wasn't somehow involved in the theft of the technology, and trying to use it. At this stage no one knows, which is cool, but i'm suspecting he may have already harvested eggs from Shaw while she was in cryo sleep, or done something along those lines. In 46 days i'll know haha.

and the xenos were made, by giger, to look like a bio-machine hybrid, this motif has been throughout Alien but we don't know where it originates from, i'm speculating that will be explored in this film, as a side issue. The blue men/engineers are supposed to have technology that we can't understand, is it so hard to imagine that an android who 'understands' human emotions would not want to somehow meddle and create his own in some way? One of the things i read the other day is that this film has rapes. I'm guessing one is by David and the other by a Blue Man.

@ takka The engineers have the allspark!

@takka_takka_takka I'm will you on this one. If xenos are a result of a Android hybrid I'll laugh my way out the movie

OK i liken it to this.... If we Tera Formed Mars.... Then we using genetics and DNA experiements created a Hybrid Race of Apes and Man, so we created the primates in say Planet of the Apes. If we then seeded them on Mars, we then gave them information to get them to say the Medevil Age and left them to get along. If they on their own then invented the light bulb, their own motorized means of transport, then created the Technology to fly in Space (which means they have knowlegde potentially of Nukes or a just as or more powerfull source of power). Lets also assume that these Ape/Men have started their own DNA manipulation to cure their own diseases, manipulate their own genes (like how we could if we wanted... i.e determine Eye Colour, Sex, get rid of Fat Gene etc). What if these Ape/Men creations then create their own Robots who are pretty much simular to themselves a artificial intelligence. Then these Ape/Men come across and find Earth and vistit us, only somehow their seems to be not many of us left. These Ape/Men are now like Gods, in how advanced they have come and how they can create their own life but only artificial. But they come to Earth, and they find Technology that we have left that we never intended them to get their hands on. They then find this Tech than can create life just as we created them, making them able to then take the step up from creating artificial life and being able to modify their own genes, to now once they study the Tech they find on Earth, allow them to create new life and not artificial ones. Would the remainder of our species then concieve our creation as a threat? Remember we may had been Kings who had our reign but now we are dying, and our creation are doing great and indeed they are like the gods now. Would we then want to wipe them out so as to protect our species? Maybe thats whats going... How would we feel towards those Ape Men? well if we was at that point much more advanced than we are now when we created them, maybe we see them just as we see Chimps now. Just as we see animals we use in Laps to test our products and new kinds of Gene Theropy on?