Prometheus Unbound

I got to see the movie Prometheus the other day.  I thought it was pretty good. I won't go into the plot too much which you can read about at here here.

     

One theme that was subtle but could still be picked up is the cycle of life in which the young replace their parents in the scheme of things, necessitating that the parents exit stage left.  A sub-plot is the revelation that Weyland, the founder of Weyland Industries (who is trying to extend his life with the help of the Engineers) is in fact Vickers father.  In a dialog between the two, Vickers states that "every king has his reign but that all reigns come to an end."  In short, she wants him to accept that his time as 'king' has come to an end and way should be made for the new king or queen for that matter.

    

Thus we come to the grand scheme of things, a reason suggested thematically (but subtlety) of why the Engineers wanted to send bio-weapons to Earth was to destroy the human race before it would become a threat (i.e. out with the old in with the new).  From the carbon dating, the Engineers at their outpost were killed around 2000 years prior suggesting they would have destroyed Earth 2 millennia if they hadn’t had a “bad day”.  So from a sub-luminal relativistic frame-of-mind, if the Engineers had visited Earth to check up on us about the year 60BC, they would have found the Roman Republic having taken over most of the Mediterranean area.   The Library of Alexandria which was the largest collection of learning still hadn’t been destroyed in a fire.  China in the East was unified and expanding in territory in the Han dynasty.  They could have well concluded that Earthlings would become a threat to their civilization in short-order (relativistically speaking).  Assuming they couldn’t communicate or travel super-luminally, they may have thought a seemingly ‘inferior’ civilization could be on their doorstep within a millineum commencing orbital bombardment given technology exponential improvement.  Notwithstanding the Dark Ages, best to nip these little whipper-snappers in the bud while they are still Earth-bound.  If for instance, these travelers lived in a star-system 100 light-years away, a 2-way trip would take at least 200-years if they are traveling at the speed of light.  So let's say on average they could get up to half the speed of light, then the 2-way trip would take 400 years.  But since they can send a signal at light-speed, the scout party would have sent a signal back so maybe it would take 300 years (100-years for the back signal and 200-years for an expeditionary ship to come with the bio-weapons back to Earth) to get a weapon on-line to wipe out Earth.  Thus such advanced planning would not seem to be so outlandish from the Engineers perspective.  

So coming back to the cycle-of-life thing, the archeologist on-board theorized that the Engineers made the humans or seeded them on Earth many thousands of years in the distant past as it is revealed that the Engineers and humans have the same DNA.  Thus the Engineers may have feared some sort of Oedipal impulse for their Earthling children to kill them and take their place as the 'kings' in their respective small part of the universe.