THE DEATH IN THE BEGINNING?

I mentioned in another thread that since there were religious undertones throughout the movie, perhaps it was the writers' attempt in laying one's life down so that others may live. A sacrificial lamb so to speak. I really dislike the idea of waxing religious, but that's my best attempt at explaining this. Someone mentioned that drinking the goo may be seen as a right of passage. While it's just as valid as my interpretation, I have a problem with this idea because it's not much of a rite of passage if your body has broken down into DNA soup.

Is it possible that the waterfall was in Earth, and the view of his DNA floating and the meiosis process occurring afterwards is an explanation to the origin of life on Earth?

[b][u]Meiosis vs Mitosis....Hmmmm?[/u][/b] [b]Meiosis[/b] is a special type of cell division necessary for sexual reproduction in eukaryotes. The cells produced by meiosis are gametes or spores. In many organisms, including all animals and land plants (but not some other groups such as fungi), gametes are called sperm and egg cells. Whilst the process of meiosis bears a number of similarities with the 'life-cycle' cell division process of mitosis, it differs in two important respects: the chromosomes in meiosis undergo a recombination which shuffles the genes producing a different genetic combination in each gamete, compared with the co-existence of each of the two separate pairs of each chromosome (one received from each parent) in each cell which results from mitosis. the outcome of meiosis is four (genetically unique) haploid cells, compared with the two (genetically identical) diploid cells produced from mitosis. [b]Mitosis[/b] is the process by which a eukaryotic cell separates the chromosomes in its cell nucleus into two identical sets, in two separate nuclei. It is generally followed immediately by cytokinesis, which divides the nuclei, cytoplasm, organelles and cell membrane into two cells containing roughly equal shares of these cellular components. Mitosis and cytokinesis together define the mitotic (M) phase of the cell cycle—the division of the mother cell into two daughter cells, genetically identical to each other and to their parent cell. This accounts for approximately 10% of the cell cycle.

In a CSI-style journey into the DNA of the alien we see strands breaking apart, then later some strands recombine. Perhaps this is meant to imply that all life began when alien DNA became a single celled organism which led to everything else? Or was it meant to imply that other life was already present, and human life was coughed up from the recombined DNA strands which got stuck in an eddy downstream from the waterfall? I'm hoping there is a different interpretation because neither of these make sense to me from what was shown. I wasn't expecting too much in the way of a coherent plot after the opening scene. At some point in time the BMM's (big mean MF's) come back & show people all over the world the five planets as a kind of test, when the humans pass the test they are ready to be killed off or mutated into ... something ?? Why not make it easier on everyone, and just kill us off way back then? Only when humans developed the technology to both detect and travel to the system represented by the planet pattern could they act upon the information delivered by the BMMs aka "Engineers". I say the BMM's should have left some kind of videos like the hologram clips which showed the panic run and the "destroy earth" mission planning. They could have shown clips from the past then segued to our planned future where we're all mutated into maniacal killing machines or worse, don't forget to pet the nice little space snakes when you see them! So to answer your question, I don't actually "KNOW" the intentions of the scene, but I think it might be what happened to a BMM when he missed the ship's blastoff. I think his emergency rations pack turned out to be a surprise pack of the black goo, the label read "Eat this only if you miss the return trip". The ones on the ship were watching and videoing it so they could laugh about it for all time.

The scene as originally shot is a somber ceremony with religious iconography galore. Ridley describes the Sacrifical Engineer as a "gardener." He is seeding a largely barren world by sacrificing himself. We do not know if they have a belief system that rewards him in an afterlife for his sacrifice or not. Part of the purpose of the scene is to set up the power of the bio-forming black goo so that we will fear its power later on LV-223. The visual look of the Engineer’s DNA was actually modeled on desiccated fish bones to give it an organic import. The decay influence of the black goo on it was effected from a real-world model of burnt styrofoam (polystyrene). In my interpretation, the goo serves as a catalyst to effect the recombination of DNA already present in the organisms in the water with that of the Engineer who self-sacrifices. The fact that the riverbank is covered in plant life—which on Earth requires DNA—leads me to this conclusion. Clearly a part of the mindset of the Engineers’ *process* includes the maxim, "Sometimes to create you must first destroy."

Perhaps the Sacrifice Engineer is not of the same faction of the later Engineers. According to Sumerian creation myths, the Sacrifical Engineer is Geshtu, an Iggigi lower God servant of the Annunaki higher Gods... similar to an Angel, who was sacrificed to create humans, who were supposed to be the new servants of the higher Gods. Maybe the Engineers from LV-223 are Fallen Angels, Demons or Rebel Iggigi who hate humans and want Earth for themselves... Who knows?

Sometime in the Precambrian era, he sacrifice engineer (the 'gardener') was ripping his DNA apart so that it could be combined with the fragile RNA-only (one helix) based microorganisms then in the ocean, to create Earth's first DNA-based evolving lifeforms. Without his sacrifice the earth would forever only be populated by simple RNA lifeforms. Since RNA lifeforms still exist today as viruses (which "live" forever with only one purpose), I'm somewhat inclined to believe that the earliest RNA lifeforms were actually "tools" made by the engineers, created to terraform the planet but also because RNA alone could not create an evolving biosphere on its own. Once the gardener changed the RNA and turned it into DNA, an explosion of new life forms began to evolve, and hidden deep in all of their genetic code were fragments of the engineer's DNA, which humans would eventually acquire. Maybe the engineers have been watching the earth ever since this "seeding" happened, since they could have intended to use it themselves as a terraformed world before it became "contaminated" with new evolving lifeforms. They watched the evolution with interest for millions of years, but once humans came along and began to rapidly develop technology and take over the earth from nature, they decided it was time to cleanse the planet of all native lifeforms using the black goo, and either settle on it themselves or re-seed it with new life. Maybe the gardener was a zealous dissident who ruined the rest of their race's terraforming plans for earth by adding DNA to the mix. Or maybe they planned the whole thing as an experiment (like an ant farm) to observe until something like the human race would come along and "ruin it" by taking over everything, polluting the environments and turning many species extinct. OR maybe RNA is just natural and the gardener did something completely on his own, and the rest of his race only found out about earth 2000 years ago and decided its lifeforms should not be allowed to exist.

Ridley said that wasn't earth

Drevkov@: No, he said it could be any planet. Earth included...

The black goo seems to be something that the Engineers believe to be sacred, that they do not fully understand. Fast forward many many years - when the military base on that planet was built, and they tried to weaponize the glack goo substance, which their society now better understands.