Theories!

Salaami
MemberOvomorphJune 08, 2012729 Views5 RepliesFirstly, I apologize if this doesn't make sense, it is currently 4:30 in the morning and I haven't slept at all.
Let’s start with the first scene, in which the Creator drinks some kind of liquid and begins disintegrating, falls into the water, and ends up creating life on earth. The liquid that man drinks is not the black goo because if it was he would have had the same symptoms that Holloway experiences when he drinks the goo later in the movie. That being said, the liquid has very similar properties to the goo in that it causes some sort of mutation/rapid duplication of genetic material.
After the creation of life the Engineers return to Earth to give humanity the Starmap that will eventually lead them to the moon LV-223.
Humanity is terrible at keeping stories the same over time. For example at some point in our history there was a "Great Flood" however, humans couldn't keep the story exact from generation to generation and it slowly changed. Therefor the Engineers must have returned to earth many more times to give the Starmap to many civilizations.
At some point in time the Engineers stopped coming to Earth. Between then and 93 AD we do not know what happened to them except for a few, very broad things.
1. Something terrible happened to them involving the black goo. We know this because the murals in the Ampuel chamber show that the Engineers dealt with the xenomorph creatures that came from the goo. Close examination of the mural showing the humanoid and a nearly indistinguishable [i]something[/i] on its arm show that the thing is actually a xenomorph about to consume the humanoid.
2. They began creating the ships. The idea of sending someone an invitation to see a weapon of mass destruction you plan on using on them makes no sense at all. Therefore, the moon must have had a different purpose when the Engineers gave humanity the Starmap.
3. There was some kind of civil war going on with the Engineers. At first the Engineers were all on the same agenda, which was to create life. We believe they were doing this because there were many ships on LV-233 that were supposed to go to many different planets. However, the agenda changed when the unknown incident involving the black goo happened to the Engineers. By the end of this incident a general consensus had been reached. Playing God (creation) is not the Engineers job. Two sides formed. One side wanted to destroy their creations since they weren’t supposed to be there in the first place (the creators of the ships). The other simply wanted to leave them alone. On LV-233 we see some of the remains of the fighting between the two sides. The dead Engineers could not have been killed by the goo or else there would be tons of aliens running around. Instead, they were killed by each other. The pile of bodies and the holograms running away support this theory.
I hope this made a little bit of sense, goodnight :)