Prometheus (2012) Part III - "They Engineered Us"

Spoiler Level – High

The Movie – A team of scientists travel across the galaxy in search of the aliens that created us. This does not go well.

I did actually like this movie in many ways. There's some sequel bate at the end, and if a sequel actually got made, I'd be interested in seeing it. Though probably just from Netflix and not in the theater.

The science is horrible.

The Scene – Prometheus opens with a tall humanoid alien on an Earth-like planet. He drinks a strange liquid, which causes him to disintegrate. Even his DNA is split into atoms. His remains fail into a nearby river, where his DNA reforms and new life begins to grow and divide.

In 2089, two archaeologists discover a cave painting, consistent with other ruins they've discovered, of a tall humanoid form pointing to a specific arrangement of dots. They conclude that these tall aliens engineered humanity and are pointing us to their home world.

Protip: Don't follow the aliens giving a Nazi salute. From Prometheus.

The apparent implication is that the alien from the first scene seeded life on Earth in order to create humanity. Later scenes even indicate that the aliens are genetically identical to humans.

The idea that we have alien creators that we can go and talk to is an interesting concept and put in direct contrast to the main character's Christian beliefs. Later revelations make it clear that the alien creators had decided to destroy us but never got the chance. The movie ends with the main character journeying to try and get more answers.

The Science – The concept that life on Earth originated from an extraterrestrial source is actually quite reasonable. The term for this is panspermia. Most commonly, they idea is that very simple life could have traveled on a meteoroid and landed on the early Earth. From there, evolution acted upon it to create the diversity of life we have now. There's good science suggesting that this is plausible, but no evidence that it really happened. It's just as plausible that life spontaneously arose on Earth. How the first self-replicated organism appeared on our planet is a mystery that is likely to never be solved.

It is even possible that an extraterrestrial intelligence seeded life on Earth. It could be accidental, such as an alien probe having some single-celled organism on it. It's possible that some of the spacecraft we've sent out in the universe could accidentally seed life on another planet. But it's also possible to do this intentionally. Some aliens with particularly long lifespans could have sent different organisms to different planets with the capacity of life to observe if/how they evolved. It's a pretty cool experiment if you don't mind waiting billions of years for data.

What's not possible is that aliens intentionally created humanity as genetic copies of themselves. Leaving human DNA on another planet would not result in new humans evolving. Evolution occurs through random mutations guided only by selection based on an organism's ability to survive and reproduce. With only DNA to seed the planet, it's difficult to guess if self-replicating life would form at all. Even seeding life with single-celled organisms, it would be impossible to predict what would evolve.

The strangest thing about the movie's depiction of this is the way the alien's DNA disintegrated and then reformed. First of all, that DNA is horrible looking. I don't know why so many movies have a problem showing realistic DNA, but this keeps happening. Based on the size of the DNA, the pieces it disintegrates to are smaller even than atoms. And most importantly, once the DNA breaks apart like that, there's no reason that they should reform into DNA at all, let alone form DNA identical to the starting sequence. I don't even know why breaking up and reforming would even be a necessary step in this seeding process.

Our genetic material or worms having sex. You decide. From Prometheus.

Fixing the Scene – There's nothing wrong with the basis of this movie. Aliens could have brought life to earth. They could have left signs for us to follow. As part of our existential desire to know where we came from, we would understandably want to find these aliens. But the aliens cannot be human.

And really, why should they be? Humanoid aliens are boring. One way Prometheus connects to the original Alien movie is by providing the answer to what the cool looking "Space Jockey" was in the earlier film. It was a major disappointment that the fascinating design of the alien was just a spacesuit for a humanoid alien. It would have been cooler if the Space Jockeys really were a non-humanoid species that seeded life with bacteria from their own planet. We'd still be distantly related to them but not genetically identical

Everything else could play out the same. They aliens still visit ancient humanity to check on their research project. When they see an intelligent life is beginning to form, they leave a message for us to find them when our technology advances sufficiently. Later, the aliens decide they need to destroy us. (The reasons were presumably saved for the sequel. But I find it easy to imagine a scenario that makes sense. Say it was friendly scientists who left us the message to come find them, but when paranoid rulers found out about us, they decided that other intelligent life was a threat and gave the order to kill us.) However, they never got the chance to do so, and we developed the technology to follow their message.

It's a natural human feeling to want to know where we came from, and science fiction is an excellent system to explore this question. The discovery of proof that we evolved from life seeded by aliens is a great device. There are major philosophical and religious questions to examine. With the aliens deciding to destroy us (our creators forsaking us), we have a situation intentionally designed to parallel the core of Christianity. There's just so much potential here, but it was executed so poorly, and I think that's why the response to the movie has been so negative. A bad movie is just a bad movie. But when you can see the potential for greatness squandered, that's so much worse.

Next Week – Continuing with the current theme, I'm going to return to the first movie I looked at and see how else it's possible to misrepresent panspermia.