"Entry of the Gods Into Valhalla" meaning?

[SpreadEagleBeagle]

@SpreadEagleBeagle

Ancient Aliens cliche stuff can be worthwhile. Well, read Lovecraft, or maybe he is also cliche?
I dont expect revelatory movie, all we disscuessed here is just an analysis of certain metaphors
Covenant would possibly contain, nothing more...

No, don't get me wrong, this thread is nothing but awesome and I love the analysis! Great stuff!

What I'm saying is that Scott, according to me, took the easy way out when he decided to pretty much turn the Alien franchise into a vessel for Erich von Danicken and his theories and beliefs (ok, lot's of hyperbole on my part there, but you know what I mean...)

Anyways, my reply was just a mere side note, so Keep Calm - Carry on! Nothing to see here! 

[The Alien Predator]

I understand your concerns Beagle, I think that there could be a lot more mystery even if some of these themes are explored. What if the Engineers are trying to "copy" the original Alien? So we can still have a mysterious biomechanoid and then we have the imitation of it.

A lot of people like the idea of Engineers imitating Space Jockeys by making similar ships and wearing similar suits, maybe they're even trying to imitate their Aliens (assuming SJ made them.)

The Weyland-Yutani report has dropped a hint that the Engineers are a "sibling race" to us rather than our creators. And Riddles compared them to angels, which further adds to this seeing as "angels" never made us, God did, and he made them too. Maybe this mysterious creator/s did the same with us, Engineers and possibly Aliens But why? For what purpose?

What if Aliens function as a sort of immune system for the galaxy? I know people compared them to viruses considering the way they reproduce via hosts like viruses and cells.

But what if humanity, Engineers and other sapient races are the actual cancerous growth that spreads and consumes resources? Some could grow so strong as to possibly endanger entire planets if not outright destroy them. Engineers alone could casually wipe out all life. So the Alien may function as a sort of balancer that keeps life in check and this could explain why the galaxy isn't teeming with life.

Have you heard of the Fermi Paradox? It states that if there are extraterrestrials capable of space travel, they'd have colonized the galaxy by now or at least have been noticeable to us.

Maybe the reason that's not the case is because all the poor bastards have been egg morphed/facehugged/head bitten into submission and extinction by the galaxy's worst nightmare. The forces of the chaos, doom and discord that is our beautiful universe.

In fact, what if the "gods" were offended at the idea that Engineers, their creation, now sought to mimic them and create? Because the leaked pictures of those deformed creatures resembles the failed RIpley clones - humans too in some way are mimicking Engineers and the "gods", trying to make their own (flawed) life and their own (flawed) Aliens and this insults the gods who only seek perfection and see themselves as truly worthy bearers of life.

For their own life to create life is an affront that must be balanced through darkness, death, acid blood baths and crunchy headbites.

[oduodu]

@spreadeaglebeagle

I agrEe with you about the direction Scott took. The engineers never should have had anything to do with mankind.

It should have remained completely ALIEN foreign ancient. Rather  extremely ancient and like the old ones from Lovecraft be from another dimension outside our time space continuum. Nether benevolent nor evil .....something else.

But what can we do ? The die is cast...

[SpreadEagleBeagle]

I understand your concerns Beagle, I think that there could be a lot more mystery even if some of these themes are explored. What if the Engineers are trying to "copy" the original Alien? So we can still have a mysterious biomechanoid and then we have the imitation of it.

This is what I've been hoping to be the case ever since I watched Prometheus the first time.

A lot of people like the idea of Engineers imitating Space Jockeys by making similar ships and wearing similar suits, maybe they're even trying to imitate their Aliens (assuming SJ made them.)

The fact still remains that the Engineers still look like giant humans. Giant humans that meddled with us during the dawn of civilization(s). I don't want there to be some cosmic link between us and the Alien as it is 'contradictory' to the indifference and godlessness that we were presented in the original movies.

The Weyland-Yutani report has dropped a hint that the Engineers are a "sibling race" to us rather than our creators. And Riddles compared them to angels, which further adds to this seeing as "angels" never made us, God did, and he made them too. Maybe this mysterious creator/s did the same with us, Engineers and possibly Aliens But why? For what purpose?

\

No thanks. I don't want any gods in the Alien universe. The only gods that exist are the ones we create in our minds to give a purpose and meaning to our existence, when in reality we're just temporary squirts in space.

What if Aliens function as a sort of immune system for the galaxy? I know people compared them to viruses considering the way they reproduce via hosts like viruses and cells.

Actually I don't want to know whether they have a grander function or not, only that they are beyond ancient, beyond primordial. Maybe the unlikely remnants from another, long gone, universe... Or maybe they come from another dimension or such... Whatever the origin is I don't want to know about it.

But what if humanity, Engineers and other sapient races are the actual cancerous growth that spreads and consumes resources? Some could grow so strong as to possibly endanger entire planets if not outright destroy them. Engineers alone could casually wipe out all life. So the Alien may function as a sort of balancer that keeps life in check and this could explain why the galaxy isn't teeming with life.

Again - cool concepts and themes, but not when it comes to the Alien franchise. It's too direct and fantastical.

Have you heard of the Fermi Paradox? It states that if there are extraterrestrials capable of space travel, they'd have colonized the galaxy by now or at least have been noticeable to us.

Maybe the reason that's not the case is because all the poor bastards have been egg morphed/facehugged/head bitten into submission and extinction by the galaxy's worst nightmare. The forces of the chaos, doom and discord that is our beautiful universe.

In fact, what if the "gods" were offended at the idea that Engineers, their creation, now sought to mimic them and create? Because the leaked pictures of those deformed creatures resembles the failed RIpley clones - humans too in some way are mimicking Engineers and the "gods", trying to make their own (flawed) life and their own (flawed) Aliens and this insults the gods who only seek perfection and see themselves as truly worthy bearers of life.

For their own life to create life is an affront that must be balanced through darkness, death, acid blood baths and crunchy headbites.

Haven't heard about the Fermi Paradox before, but I kind of like it for various reasons, one of them being that I prefer my Alien universe to be shockingly empty (possibly depopulated) when it comes to complex life-forms and advanced organisms, especially organisms of higher sentience. The Alien being the scourge of life is something I can deal with if handled the right way.

[oduodu]

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asgard?_e_pi_=7%2CPAGE_ID10%2C1662899141

From the above link:

Quote;

In thePrologueSnorri offers an euhemerizedand Christian-influenced interpretation of the myths and tales of his forefathers. Asgard, he conjectures, is the home of the Æsir (singular Ás) in As-ia, making a folk etymologicalconnection between the three "As-"; that is, the Æsir were "men of Asia", not gods, who moved from Asia to the north and some of which intermarried with the peoples already there. Snorri's interpretation of the 13th century foreshadows 20th-century views of Indo-Europeanmigration from the east.
Snorri further writes that Asgard is a land more fertile than any other, blessed also with a great abundance of gold and jewels. Correspondingly, the Æsir excelled beyond all other people in strength, beauty and talent.
Snorri proposes the location of Asgard as Troy, the center of the earth. About it were 12 kingdoms and 12 chiefs. One of them, Múnón, married Priam's daughter, Tróán, and had by her a son, Trór, to be pronounced Thorin Old Norse. The latter was raised in Thrace. At age 12 he was whiter than ivory, had hair lighter than gold, and could lift 10 bear skins at once. He explored far and wide. His father, Odin, led a migration to the northern lands, where they took wives and had many children, populating the entire north with Aesir. One of the sons of Odin was Yngvi, founder of the Ynglingar, an early royal family of Sweden.

End quote




Is Valhalla then Swedish interpretation of a Greek reality?

So what was going on in Troy?

[Immortan Jonesy]

@SpreadEagleBeagle, I can understand that you don't like it, but this is not a documentary about pseudoscience as these TV shows from History Channel. It's science fiction, so you should use the fiction of Lovecraft as a point of comparison. Also, the ideas of ancient astronauts can become interesting if you know how to use them, like in 2001 a space odyssey, and for me they are like a guilty pleasure    anyway, thank you for expressing your opinion in this thread 

[The Alien Predator]

Fair points, Beagle.

The "squirts in space" comment made me laugh because it's so true, we're not just squirts in space, but squirts in time as well.

Our very existence right now is basically one nano-second to the universe as far as time and its age are concerned.

And when I say "god", I don't mean something fantastical. I mean something so advanced and incomprehensible that our minds can't properly understand it. (There's this theme I liked in the Elder Scrolls, I know it's a fantasy setting, but the "Planets" up in the sky of that setting are actually the physical gods who are infinite - but because mortal minds can't comprehend infinity, you instead see a round planetary object instead.)

What if something like this is the case in Alien, a being comes from a different dimension, due to its utterly alien nature hailing from somewhere with laws of physics entirely different from ours, our minds may struggle to grasp them - and they may struggle to grasp us too for all we know.

And sufficiently advanced technology can seem almost magical in nature. The corrupting force of the Black Goo stretches the boundaries of science as we know it, but to the Engineers it might as well be something some kid cooked up in his nan's basement for fun.

That's what I love about Alien, that we're literally amoebas who have discovered a world beyond ours and have ventured into it only to find beings ahead of us. Imagine ants discover radio technology and realize that some giant hairy bipeds have been using this technology for a very, very long time (especially in ant lifetimes). That's humanity when compared to Engineers, Space Jockeys and hell, even Predators who see us as nothing but dumb animals to be hunted for sport.

We're truly bottom feeders, searching planets for resources like sea cucumbers search the seabed for food. Our ships are literally space cucumbers man! We're so puny that we're probably unnoticeable. imagine how daunting that'd actually be? To find out other intelligent races knew of us but ignored all our signals reaching out for the stars? Or the reason Engineers didn't destroy us was because they realized we're not worth the resource wasting trip to Earth? Maybe the one awoken by Weyland was either a fanatic devoted to that cause or someone ignorant of the change? Maybe they saw us as such lower lifeforms that when we breached the barrier of the Sol system, they were all like "wtf? So they actually did it?"

[oduodu]

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Das_Rheingold?_e_pi_=7%2CPAGE_ID10%2C3981850424

Just read the story. Interesting but very over the place. Very little about Valhalla as such.

[Immortan Jonesy]

Back on topic...perhaps the Engineers cannot reproduce themselves through sex, maybe they came to Earth in order to do experiments in human women. Or maybe they are creating hybrids in order to play to be God...as in Frankenstein.

That makes sense, angels themselves are genderless and have no genitalia.

This reminds me of an Alien novel titled Original Sin, which has the Space Jockey (before Prometheus was released), they were called "Mala'kak", I haven't read the book but apparently, they had a deal with an organization called Loki that would provide them with humans to experiment upon because they lacked the ability to reproduce by themselves.

And recently I think I saw people theorizing that Engineers create life because they lost the ability to propagate. So this is their way of studying reproduction.

You kind of do see their fascination with life, reproduction, sex etc. Their door openings can resemble a vulva, like the one seen on the Derelict. The Alien's head is a phallus. The new Facehuggers now have visible vaginas etc.

We don't know if they have genders, we haven't seen a female Engineer. Although the loincloth on the one in Prometheus does hint that there may be something there... but what if it's worn for decorative or ritualistic purposes? What if "it" had no instruments to reproduce with? So drinking the Black Goo was its way of spreading life.

And the reason we have something underneath our "loincloths" could've been done as some deliberate design from them, they had nothing under their cloths but they gave us a gift under ours. They do seem quite spiritual, creative and ritualistic.

I was gonna ask about the Nephilim but you fellas have covered it nicely.

Do you reckon there's still benevolent Engineers? The one we saw in Prometheus was a fallen angel while the ones with robes could've been the truly benevolent ones. The biomechanoids may have been the ones trying to tempt us to go to LV 223 (as seen in the cave painting) but then the robed ones may have been trying to warn us away from it (all the other civilization's artworks shown by Holloway and Shaw.)

We also see some other creations of theirs in Fire and Stone, the ones Ahab the Predator hunts. They seem to have been in better terms with their creators than we have though. The four armed red skinned primitives have cave paintings of Engineers and have yet to "sin" like we have. The bug-men who have a thriving and technological civilization haven't sinned as we see a statue of an Engineer standing tall and proud in their city street. Then we have this alien who is wearing full armour (we have no clue what it looks like) laying dead after being killed by Ahab, near it is an Engineer hologram.

So, to echo Shaw's words, just what did we do wrong and why did they change their minds? What did the other creations do to be spared? Aside from the four-armed men who are still in their very early stages, the bug-men and the armoured-men haven't wronged their makers in any way.

We've spent a lot of time talking about the life cycle of the Xenomorph, but what about the Engineer's life cycle? Maybe it's so bizarre! think about it...the origin of life on Earth, millions of years of evolution and then Homo sapiens...the new Engineers. And yeah, they (Engineers) seem to be obsessed with sexual anatomy

Also, remember that Shaw is esteril, and can't create life so to speak, perhaps the same subject is for Engineers. They can not reproduce themselves...and the human race is one of many experiments in the vastness of space. So, The Black Goo is a key element in the life cycle of Engineers.

Ridley Scott said that God created the Engineers (I think it was in "The Furious Gods: Making Prometheus") Who is this God? there is a relationship between God and the Black Goo? Is God a sexual creature? Also...What is Black Goo?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Das_Rheingold?_e_pi_=7%2CPAGE_ID10%2C3981850424

Just read the story. Interesting but very over the place. Very little about Valhalla as such.

I'll take a read, thanks! 

[The Alien Predator]

Good questions Crazy Shrimp.

This talk of Black Goo reminds me of something in the Elder Scrolls. The metal "Ebony" is believed to be the crystallized blood of the gods.

In some strange way, the Black Goo can be seen as a blood from a god, everything it touches, it changes or creates something new. In the films, we saw it modify life.

In Fire and Stone, we saw it create not just a forest, but an entire ecosystem. The mutated flesh Synthetic, Elden, was a walking genesis as someone described him. Every step he took, plants grew from the footstep into a small oasis.

I can't wait to see what exciting things we will experience in Covenant.

[whiterabbit]

If the universe is truly empty then what is the point of making alien movies. Something has to give and that something is life must exist in the universe. You all know that the alien ends up being God.

[Immortan Jonesy]

Have you heard of the Fermi Paradox? It states that if there are extraterrestrials capable of space travel, they'd have colonized the galaxy by now or at least have been noticeable to us.

A couple of videos about Fermi Paradox

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1fQkVqno-uI

There is also something called Kardashev scale. It is a method proposed by the Russian astrophysicist Nikolai Kardashev to measure the degree of technological evolution of a civilization. This is what wikipedia says:

1) A Type I civilization – also called planetary civilization – can use and store energy which reaches its planet from the neighboring star. It is not suggested that a Type I civilization would use all of the energy reaching the subject planet, since that is both a logical and technological impossibility. Therefore, humanity may already qualify as a Type I civilization.

2) A Type II civilization can harness the total energy of its planet's parent star (the most popular hypothetical concept being the Dyson sphere—a device which would encompass the entire star and transfer its energy to the planet(s)). It is not suggested that a Type II civilization would necessarily harness 100% of the energy emitted from the subject star.

3) A Type III civilization can control energy on the scale of its entire host galaxy.

There are other levels on the scale, but are based on wild speculation...

- Type 4 Kardashev Rating: The most straight forward extension of the scale to even more hypothetical Type IV beings who can control or use the entire universe or Type V who control collections of universes. The power output of the visible universe is within a few orders of magnitude of 1045 W. Such a civilization approaches or surpasses the limits of speculation based on current scientific understanding, and may not be possible.

Zoltán Galántai has argued that such a civilization could not be detected, as its activities would be indistinguishable from the workings of nature (there being nothing to compare them to).

- Type 4 Kardashev-Kaku Ratings (Michio Kaku): In his book Parallel Worlds, Michio Kaku has discussed a Type IV civilization that could harness "extragalactic" energy sources such as dark energy.

-Kardashev Alternate Rating Characteristics: Other proposed changes to the scale use different metrics such as 'mastery' of systems, amount of information used, or progress in control of the very small as opposed to the very large.

-Planet Mastery (Robert Zubrin): Metrics other than pure power usage have also been proposed. One is 'mastery' of a planet, system or galaxy rather than considering energy alone.

- Information Mastery (Carl Sagan): Alternatively, Carl Sagan suggested adding another dimension in addition to pure energy usage: the information available to the civilization.

He assigned the letter A to represent 106 unique bits of information (less than any recorded human culture) and each successive letter to represent an order of magnitude increase, so that a level Z civilization would have 1031 bits.

In this classification, 1973 Earth is a 0.7 H civilization, with access to 1013 bits of information.

Sagan believed that no civilization has yet reached level Z, conjecturing that so much unique information would exceed that of all the intelligent species in a galactic supercluster and observing that the universe is not old enough to exchange information effectively over larger distances.

The information and energy axes are not strictly interdependent, so that even a level Z civilization would not need to be Kardashev Type Ⅲ.

- Microdimensional Mastery (John Barrow): John D. Barrow, going by the fact that humans have found it more cost-effective to extend any abilities to manipulate their environment over increasingly smaller dimensions rather than increasingly larger ones, reverses the classification downward from Type Ⅰ-minus to Type Omega-minus:

a) Type Ⅰ-minus is capable of manipulating objects over the scale of themselves: building structures, mining, joining and breaking solids;

b) Type Ⅱ-minus is capable of manipulating genes and altering the development of living things, transplanting or replacing parts of themselves, reading and engineering their genetic code;

c) Type Ⅲ-minus is capable of manipulating molecules and molecular bonds, creating new materials;

d) Type Ⅳ-minus is capable of manipulating individual atoms, creating nanotechnologies on the atomic scale and creating complex forms of artificial life;

e) Type Ⅴ-minus is capable of manipulating the atomic nucleus and engineering the nucleons that compose it;

f) Type Ⅵ-minus is capable of manipulating the most elementary particles of matter (quarks and leptons) to create organized complexity among populations of elementary particles; culminating in;

g) Type Omega-minus is capable of manipulating the basic structure of space and time.

So, what kind of civilization are the Engineers? 

I think they are a mix between Type III, Type Ⅱ-minus and Type Ⅲ-minus

[The Alien Predator]

When you mentioned Kardashev Scale, I was going to ask you about the various races and where they are on it. 

I think humans are the only race we saw that started as a Type-0 and stayed on it for the duration of their history until Prometheus where they hit Type-2 and became an interstellar. Of course Kardashev mainly measures the energy output of the civilization and not necessarily how "advanced" it is, bu to give such an energy output.

So a type-3 civilization would have enough energy output that is the equivalent of the galaxy. Officially it goes from types 1 to 3 but some have went to 4 which is universal and 5 which is dimensional.

I think type-2 and 3 are advanced if they're able to have energy outputs of a star and a galaxy respectively. But it'd be funny if one has no space travel but is type-3 simply because it invented a toaster with the energy output of the galaxy. 

Predators and Engineers I imagine are type-2. Engineers may be type-3

[Ingwar]

How do you know that Aliens are ancient? I'm serious.

[Immortan Jonesy]

How do you know that Aliens are ancient? I'm serious.

You mean the aliens in real life? (which is still a mystery) or those from the Alien franchise?