ALIEN DAY Prologue 'The Crossing' - Arrival Stills

In earlier drafts it appears the planet was surrounded by a Mechanical Ring, that acted as some kind of Protection.

We can see as they are Shoe-Horning the sequel to Prometheus to connect to Alien, i.e set up events post 2094-2122 for the Derelict and Alien Egg Cargo....  then they needed to introduce a Human Element (Covenant ship) and so Planet 4 would have to be made at a distance that is reachable for Mankind after Prometheus 2094 but years prior to Alien in 2122

It is odd that more better defenses were not around, but i had my theory that would make sense to this...

Basically the Planet 4 Engineers are chosen as Sacrifices, and the whole Urns/Juggernaughts are a Evolution of the Seeding Process rather than Tear Drop ship and drop off a lone Engineer on a World.

Basically these beings felt that without their interaction and knowledge, Mankind would Advance no further than the Level they was at when they abandoned us...  hence we would still today be no more advanced than Mankind was thousands of years ago..

What a HUBRIS this was... a Naive Race who are so arrogant that they overlook the need for Protection.

but they must have given protection some serious level of thought as they seem to be able to hide the planet which would only really be for protection. so could there have been another space travelling race that the engineers took into account at the time of developing and setting that up? basically if they feared no one and never thought that mankind would evolve far enough to travel the stars, why hide the planet? also the weather on planet 4 is believed to be a artificially produced. if this is a form of defence, again, who is this intended for?

im not discrediting what ur saying, I totally agree they are an arrogant naïve race which is ultimately what will be their downfall but its maybe more accurate to say they were that arrogant they didn't believe any race would pose any real threat to them so they didn't feel any truly aggressive defences were required. theres so much missing from the franchise

@ali81

Maybe against themselves or maybe more specifically a splinter faction? And the arrival of an "alien" rogue artificial being bent on whipping you out is a "black swan" even for an advanced race who we are told that have not invented binary logic. So I don't it is about hubris.

@BigDave

When talking about the mechanical ring are you talking about the '15 prologue script. There are also mentioned ships ten times bigger then David's ship. And other security measure for contamination in the early script is that ships are shut permanently shut off, that is what crashes the Juggernaut (and David seems unable to turn it off in 10 years).

And yes, one of the biggest that the writers refused to answer is why the Engineers stopped visiting earth. They intended to whip it out 2000 years prior, what changed in the mean time?

Totally.... Agree.

My points came from a time prior to AC and when the movie came out, and since then a lot had came to light regarding the Protection of the Planet.

And so in that sense, it appeared this World had something that was intended to obscure it from detection.   When we get to the movie though, we do have the weather that maybe makes it hard to detect what is on the surface.

Was this a form of protection, could the erratic Weather and Storms Electromagnetic interference mean that any kind of Civilization would not be able to be detected until someone actually came down to the Surface...?   Certainly works for me, could the Gold Device on the Cathedral Dome Manipulate the Weather?  Certainly could work for me.

If this World had the Protection to the Level the earlier draft indicates (protected by a Structure/Ring) then clearly at the time the Covenant detect the Signal from Dr Shaw, there is nothing that really hides what this place is.

The Covenant was able to determine the World was a Habitable place, even seeming to be more suitable than Origae-6.   So either something had failed to conceal the Planet... or the only concealment was being able to detect what is on the surface due to the interference by the Storms which cant be ruled out as being Manipulated by some Technology.

NASA is currently looking at Earth Like Worlds... we are not advanced enough to be certain those detected are definitely like Earth or LV-223 or Planet 4 at this point.

We currently have no means from distance to determine what some Moons and Planets in our Solar System have, we can speculate their environments. But we can not detect what life if any until we actually send a probe down.

If say A race as advanced as we are now, came to Earth say 4'000 years ago, they would not be able to detect Civilization on Earth until they actually got pretty close and send probes or had Cameras that could ZOOM in like we can on Google Maps/Earth.

If this Race came to earth in the Modern Era since we had Technology like Electricity etc, and so even if they arrived 100 years ago then from a far distance they could detect our Civilization they would not have to get as close as they would if we was say thousands of years behind our Technology now.

With Alien Covenant, it could be and certainly seems the case that something is generating interference so that the only way to detect the World has Life/Civilization would be to get pretty darn close.

Thus without knowing the exact location of Planet 4, it is just a needle in the haystack of Worlds in the Galaxy that could potentially have Life.  So if the Prometheus never went to LV-223, or LV-223 was destroyed...    Then the likelyhood of the Covenant being attracted to go to Planet 4 would be very unlikely.. it appeared only the signal that traveled along with the Nutrino Burst... had alerted the Covenant to its origin being suspicious (take me home tune) which then led to the Covenant checking out the Signal Location and only THEN discovering that it comes from a World that is kind of Earth like.

So if there was a Alien Ship, say 50 years more advanced than we are that happened to be say 20-30 light years from Earth, they may not be able to detect Earth as of Thousands of Years ago...  But with Modern Technology of the last 150 years, it would be more likely that Radio Signals from Earth would travel through space and be detected by a Alien Race that then could determine where it came from and narrow down that needle in a hay stack that Earth would have been.

@ignorantGuy

Indeed yes, some older drafts which i have not read yet, do mention such things, we even see in the deleted Scene that the Hanger had many more Engineer ships.

I am glad none of these made it to the movie as they would have raised many many more Plot Holes or Flaws... i mean surely David would have been able to activate one?   Only reason he would not would be he needed Humans or Engineers to return so that he could have Hosts to Create his Xenomorph Army.

When i was working on my Prometheus 2, the state of the Engineer World as far as Civilization, Technology was a massive sticking point for me.  How does David and Shaw turn up at a Advanced Alien Race World and live to tell the tale?   Logically they must had been accepted by the Engineers?  Or their Civilization had been destroyed leaving a few survivors who had to start again?  Or they turned there backs on the Technology.  Or reveal these beings are actually just sub-servant to another Race long gone...

I was attempting to address all of those in  way that fitted, so my Engineer world was not in Pristine Condition and David and Shaw arrived at merely a place the Engineers came from... revealing them as merely pawns to another Race/Agenda.

I feel the Engineer World we see in AC, is kind of similar to what i had in mind, and i feel the world we got fits with the whole Plot, its better this World was not no HR Giger Heavy Sprawling Metropolis as a very HR Giger/LV-223 Tech World, with Millions of Engineers, and Advanced Ships... that are totally against Mankind..

Would really not bold well for us  when we arrive at their Front Door..

RS did say "David would be bringing Hell with him" so thats a great equalizer, but then raise the Flaw of surely the Engineers would be aware of this and have protection?

so its nice that AC we see that actually never did, which leads me to speculate similar to what i was going to run with, with my Prometheus 3, and that this World is not where the HR Giger/Engineer Technology came from.