A fictional TED talk from the year 2023 has been released today as a viral promotion for Prometheus, confirming what we heard a few weeks ago. TED is a non profit organization devoted to ideas worth spreading. It started out in 1984 as a conference bringing together people from three worlds: Technology, Entertainment, Design. In this talk, Peter Weyland from Weyland Industries (played by Guy Pearce), talks us about his own technological ambition, humankind and Prometheus. The video was conceived and designed by Ridley Scott and Damon Lindelof and directed by Luke Scott. You can watch the talk below. Alternatively you can download it in HD here.
Fox has also launched a new promotional website named after Weyland Industries: www.weylandindustries.com. In which they have included the following blurb: “Considered a seminal moment in the career of our founder Peter Weyland, this 2023 TED Talk launched Weyland Corp into the international spotlight.
In honor of our 50th year, Weyland Corp is planning to offer a new round of investment soon. Interested parties can expect to find out more within the next few days. #weylandinvestors“
The official TED site includes two additional blurbs about Peter Weyland and his talk. Make sure to read them after the cut!
Update: TED has posted up a Q&A with Damon Lindelof about his work on the viral marketing campaign. It has also been confirmed that the video was made for promotion only and won’t be in the movie.
Additionally, Jon Spaihts has commented on the TED talk, Weyland and canon via twitter, stating the following: “We tried not to violate canon wherever possible; but the canon’s not completely coherent and in the end story wins.”
“Peter Weyland has been a magnet for controversy since he announced his intent to build the first convincingly humanoid robotic system by the end of the decade.
Whether challenging the ethical boundaries of medicine with nanotechnology or going toe to toe with the Vatican itself on the issue of gene-therapy sterilization, Sir Peter prides himself on his motto, “If we can, we must.” After a three year media blackout, Weyland has finally emerged to reveal where he’s heading next. Wherever that may be, we will most certainly want to follow.”
“Sir Peter Weyland was born in Mumbai, India at the turn of the Millennium. The progeny of two brilliant parents; His mother, an Oxford Educated Professor of Comparative Mythology, his father, a self-taught software Engineer, it was clear from an early age that Sir Peter’s capabilities would only be eclipsed by his ambition to realize them. By the age of fourteen, he had already registered a dozen patents in a wide range of fields from biotech to robotics, but it would be his dynamic break-throughs in generating synthetic atmosphere above the polar ice cap that gained him worldwide recognition and spawned an empire.”
In less than a decade, Weyland Corporation became a worldwide leader in emerging technologies and launched the first privatized industrial mission to leave the planet Earth. “There are other worlds than this one,” Sir Peter boldly declared, “And if there is no air to breathe, we will simply have to make it.“
people over here are going nuts about it
http://www.prometheusforum.net/discussion/comment/6732#Comment_6732
what if they are all already owned by other companies? what if there was a massive war that destroyed many of them? what if our assumptions on their composition are wrong? or perhaps there's something specific that our asteroids don't have much of, but other ones in other systems do? since it is never mentioned we can never know, but you just have to suspend your disbelief.
The answer to that is easy. Yes. We either do, or the human race dies. There's no if about it. It's a when. The dinosaurs are our warning.
I consider the economic downturn to be exactly what it is. A temporary, painful thing we have to go through. We've seen this before. Economies go up, they go down, they come back up again. The only difference is the severity and length in the dips and spikes. We'll come back up again. Faster, if we find someone who creates something revolutionary. (Creates something that plants the seeds for new industry). Something like a new power source.
So I think in that respect the movie/this viral video are not too far off the track from what we need. A man with vision and ambition. (we need many men and women like that willing to put their hears, minds, and money into space.)
A single asteroid could contain more precious metals than all that has been mined from the Earth in our history. And as there are thousands of asteroids...
Acids be acids. It must be some other corrosive substance. The humans call it an acid because that's how it appears to them. Unless the future military isn't ready for Teflon.
-Chris
One problem with colonising Jupiters moons is the radiation.
With the sun gone aswell, even if we have colonised as far as Jupiter's moons, we still have to think about the problems of no heat and light from the Sun, no solar energy and an alternative has to be found.
A great story in the manga 2001 Nights had a ship travel protected in an asteroid of ice at STL speed to find another Earth-like planet to colonise. The humans on the ship were frozen samples to be made into fetus' and raised on ship by androids when they reached a planet and spent some time in orbit until the babies grew to a suitable age.
Heres the twist;
Spoiler
before you guys think it's probably nothing, note that the single pixel for the blinking star has an interesting name given to it:
https://www.weylandindustries.com/img/findme.gif
assuming we haven't mined them all already?
Unobtainium
But seriously, there's a lot of reasons they could be mining that far out in space. That's where fanwank comes in
I never quite saw the point of the Nostromo, why send a ship light years from Earth when we have more than enough asteroids in our own back yard.
The cold, harsh reality of space exploration. Urgh, that was painful to read but true.
I think the bajillion rocks that have crashed into Mars and whatever ancient atmosphere the planet had that is so very thin these days have already "destroyed" Mars. Unless you're really implying the barren rock is somehow sacred with this sarcastic remark.
I say drill the Hell out of Mars!
Mining is actually exactly what Mars needs. Anything to create more greenhouse gases and thicken that atmosphere up.
Perhaps the ship herself?
That's it, this viral campaign has me by the short-hairs.
-Chris
But they aren't mining our solar system in Alien, they are way out in the boondocks. And in order to do that they must have FTL, which is entirely implausible. We are already in fantasy land, no reason to get picky now.
-Chris
I really hope that "big change" is sufficiently plausible
Mining, hence the Nostromo and presumably other ships of it's type. And remember that the viral is suggesting that Peter Weyland reveals something world changing so using the world as it is now as a starting point is useless IMO. In the next 11 years something big changes it into the fictional world of the Alien series.
-Chris
It was founded by a Pom. Better than nothing. News Corp was originally an Australian company but is now based in Delaware.
It does conform to the Tokyo, London, San Fran, Sea of Tranquility, Thedus thing from the blu-rays though.
f**kin' hipsters...
it's probably more profitable to be right next to all the possible economic allies, subsidiaries and inversionists. America is the world's largest fair.
i asume future people will think old junk is cool just like we do. then someone decides to buy a dusty trademark and do weird things with it. business as usual.
Let's face it--there is no money in space. When corporations can conceivably find a way to make lots and lots of money in space to pay for the insane amounts of cash it's going to take to build all these ships, life support systems, habitats, terraforming technologies, etc, then maybe we'll have a future beyond this planet. But for the time being, in the decades to come the only people going up into space are going to be super-rich blowhard tourists and an increasingly dwindling number of scientists.
Of course, you're view is probably more optimistic. I guess we'll just have to see what happens
This makes sense. Although if true, I feel like they would be trying to make things overly complicated to seem smart. I'd feel better about them just pacing the historical evolution of technology at a more reasonable pace.
But it's science fiction right! Although I always like when science fiction seems plausible.
realistic or not, it's not the first time Sci-fi turns out to be wrong. we've got to asume it's a different reality with different things happening. because that's what fiction is.
Yes. Really. There have been dozens of manned and unmanned pet projects coming into fruition in the last ten years. Corporations are talking about their own private fleets for tourism and business. Talks of private citizens going into space. There are even many people hitting the high side of forty working together to be the first to colonize Mars if and when that mission begins. Their goal is to spend the rest of their lives on Mars, paving the way as proverbial Johnny Appleseed's for the next generation of human beings to live on Mars.
There are plans, and where NASA is starting to fade, others are looking to the sky. China and Russia are very interested in space, and though nothing is yet concrete, they are planning things. Other, smaller nations have been planning various unmanned and manned missions back to the moon and mars for the last fifteen years. Just because it's not happening "yet" does not mean we won't see a huge BOOM within the next half a century. An awful lot can, and does, happen in half a century.
Be a shame if they went down that Chariots of the Gods road - though it all depends on how it's handled.
Yes I think that may come into play. I don't mind it so much though, as long as they leave out the time travel bits.
-Chris
Lets face it, that was effectively the story in Terminator 2 - a piece of future technology winding up in the present day, giving Cyberdyne cutting edge technology 'that we would never have thought of' etc.
I dont like the idea but it certainly gives a reason for Peter Weyland to bring up Prometheus in his speech. Also the mention of his mother, being a Professor of Comparative Mythology. She could be a factor in the tracing and decoding of the knowledge.
And of course, the naming of the starship as "Prometheus".
Still, it's science fiction and will all depend on the execution, I suppose. We'll see.
The privatization of space is something that has been happening already and is picking up pace today. The Weyland Corp site mentions that "Weyland Corporation became a worldwide leader in emerging technologies and launched the first privatized industrial mission to leave the planet Earth."
This is not NASA but a giant conglomeration with virtually endless resources.
-Chris
Yeah. It's 60-odd years from now (in a fictional universe no less).
Once you'd set up a lunar base, you could conceivably do it on any of the other moons in the solar system. And if they're talking about terraforming - they all you could really do is Venus, Mars and Titan I think. The trick is doing it in a way that's cost effective and obviously by 2073 this fictional company has done just that.
I think one of the things that the speech was attempting to hi-lite was how quickly technology has been advancing in the last few decades. It is commonly referred to as exponential growth (which it isn't really) so if you imagine that this advancement continues apace then things could happen in fairly short amounts of time.
-Chris
50 years is too quick to be having colonies in the solar system? Why?
I was really hoping that this movie would be the FIRST deep space mission that the human race has undertook. Now that's lost for me. And the whole thing is far too Dharma Initiative. I don't like the modern world featuring in an ALIEN movie through the Internet.
A comparative glut
-Chris