about that "cultural" thing that I just dont get at all

lol Svanya. True Indeed. But for "film sake".... aaarghhhhh

It's not our place to judge other creatures cultures XDXDXDXD

Maybe you should ask the thousands of Mexica warriors who gave up their hearts so that Huitzilopochtli could get his daily sustenance and move across the sky.

Ah, Outlander, true. But the thing is, If the "first sacrifice" idea is for real, how did humans get to know about it if there were none at that point?

Darkeequation: In another recent thread there is a link to an interview with the dude that plays the SJ in Prometheus where he says it clear enough. But I do like your idea [way more than the "sacrifice" one]. Please elaborate more on it friend.

Well to be fair, it was never established that this was a part of their culture. I still think that the Engineer was sentenced to die by his kind and the earth was supposed to serve as his tomb. His disintegrated body just happened to kickstart life on earth and it was not some kind of noble act of kindness. This would also tie nicely into the notion that when the Engineers discover what happened (because the crew of the Prometheus visit them) they want to send a ship to earth to wipe us out.

I think it could be possible that when one Engineer's time is up he must kill himself to make way for other Engineers. This could be why the Engineer was brought to earth and forced to drink the potion which killed him. The earth can be seen like a giant tomb kind of like how the pyramids were to the Pharaohs. Except that something goes wrong (maybe there was primitive cell life in the water that the Engineers did not know about like moss or algae) and the Engineers DNA goes into the nucleus of those cells (akin to a super advanced form of a retrovirus) and sows the seeds for advanced lifeforms . This could then be a play on the Prometheus myth in that the punishment of a god-like entity is what ignited the fire for the development of advanced life-forms instead of the other way around.

For human's to have obtained the concept of sacrifice from the Space Jockey, maybe its genetically written into our dna?

ah, food for thought... I see your point.

Good one[b] Enginner[/b]

[quote][i]I think it could be possible that when one Engineer's time is up he must kill himself to make way for other Engineers.[/i][/quote] Yes, but he says he is a YOUNG engineer, and there are older ones as well. IF, and I do mean IF the engineers are made by another race with genetic qualities that change other DNA, then maybe this is just their reason to exist. Or, this smart-assed young punk has a theory and the older SJs let him learn the hard way... LOL Whatever the reason may be, I hope THAT is made clear in the film.

David 1: Cheers dude, just thought it kind of made sense, as if they are our creators and they are messed up concerning having a God complex then it makes it understandable for us to have obtained hubris from them as well, almost hereditary from a parent to child in terms of mental compass and ideas.

@ David 1 wheatear you find this concept corny or not I find it very interesting and intriguing as many others have, if not look at all the other post.

The theme of self sacrifice has been a recurring one much trough-out all of mankind's recorded history and quite possibly beyond that.

So is that what the urns are filled with, the disintegrated bodies of engineers and other life forms maybe?

@David1 I mean... it's not practical from Man's view point... (newsflash, they aren't men! For those with difficulty distinguishing between men and engineers, engineers are bluey, men are pinky browny things.) Not every human has the same value on their own life, and there are regular stories of self sacrifice. Don't project your own values onto everything else, it's highly unlikely everything else has your values, even in your own school) And created creatures would not have witnessed it because... there were none at that point [so how could we have learned from a "sacrifce" to begin with]. (firstly,who says there are created creatures witnessing it? secondly, why couldn't they witness it? don't think from one snatched sentence in an interview that you have seen the film. The engineer is most likely to have put something in the water that will alter human dna, not create it from scratch. But plotwise, he could just as easily be creating all life from scratch..... the big bang. from one (singularity) to everything) But that "Sacrifice" thing... man... It just sounds corney as hell. War films are full of cornyness. Especially in American films. They're a byword for corny. Amazed people slag off a movie they haven't seen.

I would call it a preconception and ideology to potential disappointment rather than slagging the film off. I think people are just worried certain ideas that could potentially be correct they may find disappointing to have put into the film. Personally I think we have more similarities to the Space Jockeys than we realise from what I have surmised, especially concerning overreaching. But thats my opinion

Well, this may be a bit too much, but there are people who have developed theories of human development that center around the sacrificial act. Rene Girard, for example, has suggested that ritual sacrifice, or the violence of the all against the one, is a sociological mechanism designed to reduce mimetic rivalry (long story) and restore order within tribal societies. In fact, it is now being suggested that the old story about human beings developing agriculture, coming together in static communities and then developing ritual sacrifice and religious practice is entirely backwards. The Gobleki Tepi, a site for religious pilgrimage uncovered in Turkey, predates agriculture and fixed communities. As a result, it is now suggested that people first began to gather for the purposes of ritual practice and sacrifice and that agriculture, the arts, and even the domestication of animals took shape around these first sacrifical sites as a way of providing for a stationary "preisthood", their servants and sacrificial victims. Girard even believes that early human governments, kings and chiefs, were sacrificial victims who successfully projected their punishments onto other people or populations. You can find all kinds of evolutionary biological and anthropological texts online with a little probing, but the point is that ritual sacrifice may be the central symbol, the founding sociological mechanism, of all human culture.

I'm not quite sure I get what you mean. But I think the sacrifice and the subsequent "training" of the intelligent species that result from it serve a purpose for the Engineers, one that isn't really benevolent the way that Shaw and Holloway seem to think it is at first. If you want life to evolve along a certain path, you make sure they only have certain building blocks. If you want the dominant intelligent species to be very similar to your own, you make sure that they only use [i]your[/i] building blocks. For some reason, they wanted us to at least be similar to them once we had evolved enough to come find them. It sort of goes back to something that always bothered me about the first film. The xeno's lifecycle is just so well adapted to human biology that it's almost inconceivable that this creature wasn't designed and bred to kill humans. The xeno had to be created with humans (or something very much like them) in mind. Even when we're talking about mutations of crew members and such, an intelligent mutation that doesn't just kill whatever it is you're trying to mutate requires either a very intimate knowledge of that creature's biology, or a "mutation agent" that could adapt to literally any biological code system it encountered. The latter situation is far less likely to provide you with the results you want, no matter how advanced of a species you are, since you're just guessing and have no idea what you might encounter. So it makes sense to me that they would ensure that we are built from the same stuff, and the differences between us simply arise from a slightly different environment and evolutionary path. Hence the sacrifice, it kind of leaves nothing to chance.

[quote][b][i]...But the thing is, If the "first sacrifice" idea is for real, how did humans get to know about it if there were none at that point?[/i][/b][/quote] I'm finding it all pretty straight forward. A young engineer is sent to earth and his sacrifice results in either the creation of humans or possibly all life-forms. Life then evolves, and some time into the 'future' they come and visit to inspect their 'breed'. By then, humans have evolved enough to realise that those are higher beings. Their appearance is a phenomenon they cannot comprehend. Maybe they've even done horrible things to those early humans, abducted them, so they quite naturally felt the urge to worship and satisfy them, instead of fighting, which would have been utterly pointless considering their advanced intellect and technology. Humans then also start engraving those events in stone, those pictograms found by our advanced selves. The thing I'm struggling with is, why would they come to earth again only to wipe us out after having 'seeded' us in the first place? Was there something wrong with their 'elixier', their DNA mixture, so that we evolved further and more advanced than they had initially intended? I hope the film will give answers to those questions...