What Did We Really Learn About the Space Jockey?

Also, in the movie, Noomi says in the end that the engineers choose to not destroy earth, and she likes to know why, so they start their journey to the engineers home-planet. But the engineers clearly didn't chose this, as the last Space-jockey on Prometheus-planet instantly continued his mission to reach Earth when he woke up. So there must have happened something, around 2000 years ago (the corpses of the engineers were dated 2000 years old), which changed the course of destroying Earth. So the biggest questions that remain are: 1. Why did the space-jockeys wanted to destroy life on Earth instead of colonizing it? 2. What happened to the plan of erasing life on Earth, 2000 years ago?

Come to think of it, the xeno wall sculpt looks as if it's arms are outstretched. (I'm probably headed straight for hell for that.)

Are you saying the black goo infects everything. Plant life for instance? Maybe the SJ's are purely interested in everything else on earth... And not us. Earth's home to a lot of cool shit. It's a shame we've screwed it up so badly. Imagine what it'll look like in another 80 years.

Hmmm, I keep wondering about the relationship between the xeno and the Space Jockeys. I don't get the impression that the Jockeys have females. So maybe we are looking at an asexual race that reproduces by using hosts for their "offspring". Maybe the xeno was intended to be some next-gen version of themselves that incorporated the best elements of bio and mecha- making the use of things like biosuits obsolete. A xeno with SJ intellect would be quite an accomplishment: super-smart yet tough in almost any kind of environment. Biological organisms are always at war with their own flesh, since it's weak and subject to decay. Maybe the xeno was their attempt at immortaility and it backfired, leaving them with something that was extremely skewed- somehow their intellect didn't quite transmit to the final product and all that was left was pure survival instinct to the Nth degree. No wonder the old man wanted access to the technology, he saw the same potential for immortality as the Jockeys did. The quest for immortality is a powerful motivational force in our society and I would imagine that it was the same in the Engineer's home world. As for why the Engineers didn't deploy their nano goo to Earth earlier, maybe it was the responsibility of that particular Engineer "platoon" on LV-226 to do so. Of course, this leaves open an important question- why didn't the home world check in on the engineers on LV-226 (assuming they were decimated too quickly to report back in time)? Taking this question into account, there are only two possibilities: they couldn't, since they possibly met the same demise somehow, or they wrote them off as casualties. The remaining Engineer, knowing he was "stuck", went into cryo in hopes that one day his people would ultimately come looking for him. Instead he got us- arrogant children raiding his self-imposed tomb.

@ Ancienthuman - isn't it obvious? They're going to say that Jesus was an alien in the sequel! I'm joking, but it doesn't seem like anything is off the table at this point...

@ Molecunar it is very unlikely that they wanted to create a better version of themselves. the alien in the end show no improvement of the SJ, except in terms of being a very effective parasite.

Considering that the SJ in the beginning of the movie created life in water by the black substance, we can conclude it would destroy plant-life as well. But why destroy the planet and making it dangerous for themselves as well?

But we already knew this was going to be about our makers, we saw that in the featurettes and everything, and the fact that they make or have bioweapons is something we have already seen in ALIEN. We know little to nothing more about them...

Perhaps Earth was seeded as a "backup" once the Engineers started getting heavily involved in thier genetic work...just in case things went wrong.

An explanation could be that an Alien provided humans with technology, and that human race is seen as a threat. Maybe there was an Alien that tried to help humans 2000 years ago, by providing them with alien knowledge. Which would express the meanning of Prometheus (the mortal that brought fire from the gods to the humans).

Not mortal, but Titan

I can see it now: Prometheus 2 - The opening scene is a small village in Israel - 30A.D. There's a lot of commotion and people are gathering around in a small house. A young boy is convulsing and behaving like he's in pain. A man is standing over him with his hand out and an advanced, technological gizmo in it. The gizmo extracts an alien from the boy and he stops convulsing. The man takes the alien and destroys it. He's revealed to be Jesus of Nazareth and declares to the crowd, "The demon has left him! Go, and sin no more!" Cut to - Movie Title P R O M E T H E U S : Judgement of Sin

It could be that the terravorming of planets backfired somehow (maybe making competitors in creating evolutions?), which caused them to immediately kill all life they created in the first place.

Isn't it amazing how much theorizing happens AFTER people have seen the movie?

Prometheus 2: Noomi reaches the home-planet of SJ's, and finds it empty and erased by the "black death". She finds out that there are two groups of SJ's. One group wants to destroy life, while the other wants to create and preserve it. The ones that wants to destroy it, were evolved to new creatures, hungry for killing and war. these creatures are known as "Predators"!!!!

@dsjohnson84 We learn that SJ's are hostile and not friendly. We know now that something happened to SJ's 2000 years ago in which the annihilation of Earth was prevented. We know that humans are a result of terravorming by the Aliens. We know that the "black death" is the cause of annihilation of the SJ's. We know that humans have received knowledge from these SJ's in some time in the Alien-universe.

Wait i'm confused. Based on the original "Alien" shouldn't the space jockeys have been friendly aliens? Weren't they sending out a signal to others to stay away from the planet (a warning) so no one one else would come in contact with the Alien eggs? Thats the impression i always got from watching "Alien".

Oh, wow! And I thought I was joking!

@Ancienthuman We learn that the SJ's are hostile? How was that NOT clear from the trailer? The ship is LEAVING. Shaw begs Janek to STOP IT or else "there will be no home to go back to." We see the SJ headed for the chair. We see the ship leaving. We understand that, that ship and it's driver are a threat to Earth. For a looooong time now, it has been theorized that the hologram from the trailers is a black box recording of events... hence all the dead bodies we see in the ship. It's already clear, from the trailers, something happened... We know that human kind is a result of the experiments of the Engineer because that's the whole premise of the information in the trailers. That was probably the clearest point made! This movie is about meeting our makers, and we know they do! The black death killing the SJ's. In significant. Minor detail. Easy to assume they died from something they created... Humans received knowledge from these SJ's? That's also clearly in the trailers. I'm still waiting for something that was not there, outside of minor things.

But seriously, what I find interesting, is that the SJ's show no survival motives. The SJ that wakes up start killing instead of making a dialogue with the humans. And the SJ in the beginning of the movie sacrifices himself. Or was the spreading of the "black death" a mean of survival, just as the forming of life on Earth?