Which came first?

@Curulean Blue

There are a couple of ways I could approach your question, but maybe the first step is to understand what the question is really asking. So, are you asking if the xeno is artificially engineered or the result of a natural process. ?

Ok the Xnomorphs are made by the Engineers. The Xnomorphs are mech-organic machines that are a weapon to kill everything on a world. The space jockey was going somewhere with a cargo load of weapons to deliver them. I want to go out on a limb here and say that everyone is mistaken about the distinction between the Engineers and the space jockeys. The space jocky is supposed to be an Engineer in a suit. Look at the movie again. I know this could be a very wrong interpritation so no hard comments if I am wrong about the space jocky and the engineers.

Nobody knows for sure yet of course but my bet is the engineers found the black goo thinking it was from god used it and mastered it then the thing that made the goo came back (a god like being) from across the universe and found the engineers / elders using it and maybe a war broke out between the elder empire and this being and when we finally get to 'paradise' we will find the last elder locked in battle trapped with the being who was mind controlling the prometheus crew in order to get them to come free it from its prison :) . Or something similar lol ! So the xenos / goo is all off cuts from the being without the intelligence if you know what I mean so although they are new they come from a very very old alien before engineers were created. :p

I think that the engineers stole the black stuff from the elders. The elders used it to seed life but when the engineers got their mitts on it, they didn't know how to control it, so, it turned on them.  Just a thought.

Necro, I agree. I think they stole the Goo as well. I maintain that there are 2 'factions' or indeed-'Elders'.

the theft of the goo from ' The Gods ' is in keeping with the Prometheus mythology as well.

@Batchpool - Good point! 

I guess I am asking whether the Engineers 'found' the Xeno already existing somewhere in the universe, or if they engineered them on LV223?  Also, I would ask that if they found the Xeno existing in the universe, did they find a fully grown Xeno wandering around, or did they find a bunch of eggs that were left for an unsuspecting victim to one day wander upon & re-start their lifecycle?

I guess I would also like to know if the eggs on the Derelict in Alien were being brought to LV223 to fulfill a prophesy of the Xeno, or if they were being taken away after getting out of hand?

Well there are many different scenerios, and through each movie and each draft each movie is based on and deleted scenes and unused concepts we seem to keep getting a twist something different.

You see the first Orgins of the Story was Star Beast, this seemed to show that some Ancient Alien Race had created a Temple to host the Leathery Urns that contain the Octopoid Face Hugers that was used on Sacreficial Creatures to produce the Organism that goes through various stages of a Life Cycle that ends with it Morphing a Victim to Produce another Learthery Urn Spore. Thus the Cycle Starts again.

The Space Jockeys well the giant beings that they was based off, had came across this temple and was in the process of taking some of these Urns to their ship when they got infected.

Alien changed a few ideas, due to budget and timing they had to merge the Alien Eggs and Space Jockey into one place instead of the Eggs being on a seperate Temple.

Alien had more mystrey compared to Star Beast and we dont have to go into detail about Alien, as we know we have the DC cut that shows Egg Morph and the Normal Cut that does not show us how the Alien Procreates....

Aliens and onwards gives us the Queen....

I know i am going off Topic a bit, but Prometheus seems to try and borrow some unused concepts from Star Beast.

The Murals do show us that the Engineers had come across the  Xeno at a earlier point and this could be thousands of years if not much more before the LV 223 outbreak.

The question is does the Xeno Eggs come from the Black Goo, was they a result of comming from some experiment and evolution of something that the Goo was used on.

Or does the Goo come from the Xeno or some Organism that is the predessor to the Xeno Eggs.

This is a area that we can not be sure of, but Ridley has given comments that had he got chance to make a Alien 5 he would have set it prior to Alien and shown us the Alien Homw World.

Does this lead us to where the Xeno came from, or did he mean the Space Jockey?

I would have to assume that these Engineers are a slave race creation of the Elders in their own image, just as we are created from sacreficed Engineers.

I would have to say that the Xeno could be either some organism they came across that they borrowed Tech and Genetics off, they basically came across them or their ancestors and experimented on them, to gain the Bio Tech.

And maybe the Goo came from them....

Or most likely the Ancient Goo was used to experiment on the Xeno at a latter date long after our creation....

But we cant be sure as there is just so many different posibilities.

But i would say that the Xeno predates the Goo in the Urns, but cant be sure that the goo at the start of the movie comes from the Xeno.

If the question is what comes first the Egg or Xeno... well the same thing applies to the Chicken or the Egg.....

Ok i will post short answer to the OP, to save going through the above lol.

I would say at the very least the Engineers or the Elders came across the ancestor of the Xeno, or maybe even the Xeno at some point...

They either then experimented on this creature to produce the Xeno or Eggs, i would say they accidently came across a relation to the Xeno and having seen its life cycle they tried to recreate such a thing or experiement on them.

Maybe it could be more likely that the Engineers came across a Egg, unwittingly just as Cain did in Alien, and also like the Giant Beings did in Star Beast.

And just how throughout the Alien franchise it was Weylands agenda to capture a Xeno and experiment on them and maybe use them for medical and military applications.

I think the Engineers did so like wise, only they had managed to achieve what  Weyland Yutani had sought after.

There is a alternative route in that the Engineers created the xeno Eggs, but if this is so, i would not say it was from scratch but as a experment.

But again their really is so many different outcomes and hopefully be the time we finish with the Prometheus Franchise  we will know, to a degree the connection the Engineers had with the Xeno..

i.e

1) Found as are and used them...

2) Found something and experimented on them to create the Xeno.

3) They created the Xeno from scratch.

4) There is some other higher being that created both Engineers and Xeno.

5) The Xeno or its Ancestor is the creator of the Engineers and Xeno.

Thats a really complicated question, because we're shown the black goo which was 2,000 years old and supposedly the beginnings of a xenomorph. I think its possible that the ship with the dead space jockey pilot had was possibly the original eggs were enhanced also and so they were first. Than later on they restarted a genetic program that blew up in their faces like last time. What the Engineers might have done 2,000 years earlier is maybe they liquified their DNA and then placed them inside the urns in the Ampule Room. In order to hold them in a cargo bay instead of having them be in one big room roaming around and accidentally letting them out prematurely. They just militarized it more and more.

@everyone

Everyone please read this and accept it. To keep thinking in vague notions of what or what might be is pointless and a waste of time.

Unlike many other recurring enemy extraterrestrial races in science fiction, the Aliens do not have a technological civilization, but are predatory creatures with no higher goals than the propagation of their species and the destruction of life that could pose a threat (the film Prometheus implies they were engineered as a biological weapon by an advanced race.

The Alien design is credited to Swiss surrealist and artist H. R. Giger, originating in a lithograph called Necronom IV and refined for the series' first film, Alien. The species' design and life cycle have been extensively added to throughout each film.

NO ONE IN THIS ENTIRE FRANCHISE EVEN GIGER WHO ORIGINALLY DESIGNED THEM THOUGHT OF THEM AS A SEPERAT INTELIGENT SPEICES. Giger was art was the aesthetic
for the depiction of the Alien not the actual O’Bannon derived written screen play for the origin
of the Alien.

O'Bannon had written twenty-nine pages of a script titled Memory comprising what would become the film's opening scenes: a crew of astronauts awaken to find that their voyage has been interrupted because they are receiving a signal from a mysterious planetoid. They investigate and their ship breaks down on the surface.^[16][17] He did not yet, however, have a clear idea as to what the alien antagonist of the story would be.^[15]

O'Bannon was impressed by Foss' covers for science fiction books, while he found Giger's work "disturbing":^[15] "His paintings had a profound effect on me. I had never seen anything that was quite as horrible and at the same time as beautiful as his work. And so I ended up writing a script about a Giger monster."

In total Hill and Giler went through eight different drafts of the script, mostly concentrating on the Ash subplot but also making the dialogue more natural and trimming some sequences set on the alien planetoid

When standing upright, the Aliens are vaguely bipedal in form, though they adopt a more hunched, quadrupedal stance when walking or sprinting. They have a skeletal, biomechanical appearance and are usually colored in muted shades of black, blue or bronze. Their body heat matches the ambient temperature of the environment in which they are found, so they do not radiate heat, making them indistinguishable from the background.

O'Bannon said in an interview, "when suddenly, that word alien just came out of the typewriter at me. Alien. It's a noun and it's an adjective."[3] The word alien subsequently became the title of the film and, by extension, the name of the creature itself.

Prior to writing the script to Alien, O'Bannon had been working in France for Chilean cult director Alejandro Jodorowsky's planned adaptation of Frank Herbert's classic science-fiction novel Dune. Also hired for the project was Swiss surrealist artist H. R. Giger.

Scott mandated that he base his work on Necronom IV, saying that to start over from the beginning would be too time-consuming. Giger signed on to design the adult, egg and chest-burster forms, but ultimately also designed the alien planetoid LV-426 and the Space Jockey alien vessel.

Giger conceived the Alien as being vaguely human but a human in full armor, protected from all outside forces. He mandated that the creature have no eyes, because he felt that it made them much more frightening if you could not tell they were looking at you.

The set with the deceased alien creature, which the production team nicknamed the "space jockey", proved problematic as 20th Century Fox did not want to spend the money for such an expensive set that would only be used for one scene. Ridley Scott described the set as the cockpit or driving deck of the mysterious ship, and the production team was able to convince the studio that the scene was important to impress the audience and make them aware that this was not a B movie.[46][51] To save money only one wall of the set was created, and the "space jockey" sat atop a disc that could be rotated to facilitate shots from different angles in relation to the actors.[17][51] Giger airbrushed the entire set and the "space jockey" by hand.[46][51

The origin of the jockey creature was not explored in the film, but Scott later theorized that it might have been the ship's pilot, and that the ship might have been a weapons carrier capable of dropping Alien eggs onto a planet so that the Aliens could use the local lifeforms as hosts.[24] In early versions of the script the eggs were to be located in a separate pyramid structure which would be found later by the Nostromo crew and would contain statues and hieroglyphs depicting the Alien reproductive cycle, offering a contrast of the human, Alien, and space jockey cultures.[18] Cobb, Foss, and Giger each created concept artwork for these sequences, but they were eventually discarded due to budgetary concerns and the need to trim the length of the film.[17] Instead the egg chamber was set inside the derelict ship and was filmed on the same set as the space jockey scene; the entire disc piece supporting the jockey and its chair were removed and the set was redressed to create the egg chamber.

So much of this film was intended to have the aliens as a separate species underneath the ship. In other
explanations the Aliens have a home world, a culture, with different aspects to their biological cast.

So you know what believe or interpret however you want because I am tired of trying to speculate without any facts. Everyone can say whatever they want I am going by the films PERIOD. I don’t care what is written in comics or books. I am going by the films. I like what is in the films the most out of any of this stuff anyway. Speculation is wishful unproductive thinking in my opinion. Enjoy whatever you want but the truth is a lot of people did have very different divergent interpretations of this so there is no way of really knowing who wanted what. That’s why I stick with the films and I just enjoy that more anyway. 

I am always open to meaningfull critical interpretations. Completely wishful speculatoins no. That is why I posted eactly everything that I posted to prove that the original writer of this film, then other added writer, the director, Giger, the producers, and even the special effects team all had competing ideas on what the alien was, where it came from. I am sticking with the films nothing more. Conjecture gets to the point that its frustrating even trying to enjoy the conversation...it's not worth having after too much of it.

Well you see there are the clues in this movie and i dont want to go into too much detail.

And this is just what i have seen from the clues, and what Fox may want us to believe may not match my interpretations.... my views match the ideas that Spaights had and indeed also what Ridley had said about the LV 426 event.

Basically we see that the Sacreficial Scene the Engineers DNA broke down into a new substance that was able to either evolve basic life, or change into basic life forms that evolved the end result at the very least was mankind, and maybe all advanced life on Earth.

We share our DNA with the Engineers and we are not shown signs that our DNA has any Xeno traits....

The Goo we see from Ampules we see leads to mutations (and especially if we look at alternative Fifield and unused props and concepts) that have Xeno traits and indeed the series of events from Holoways infected Sperm to Shaws birth of her Baby Trilobite gave us in essence a Organism much like a Face Huger that had same purpose and led to the Deacon which had a lot in comon with the Xeno.

If the Goo is the same throughout then why does Shaw give birth to such organism that leads to a Deacon, instead of having a more humanoid offspring and also why did mankind not have Xeno traits.

Then we need look at the Mural, this shows us at the very least a Deacon/Xeno related Organism in a cruciform pose... does that mean its God... nope, Jesus lol hell no... does it mean they worshiped the organism and its lifecycle.. yes they must have held it in high regard.

Then we see in same Mural Bald Headed Humanoids being Face Hugged by a Organism that is more closer to the Face Huger than the Trillobite, maybe this shows us that the Mural is not a premamisson or propechy etc.

If we go back to Spaights draft, the Sacreficial Engineer put his arms out cruciform before falling into the waterfall, does this pose intend to show us his Sacrefice?  The reason why the Cross and why Christians worship and carry etc the Cross and sometimes jesus on the cross is not to show Worship to him, but that image is because its the action that Christ did to Sacrefice himself to save mankind, thus the cruciform pose of Christ is to show us his Sacrefice for us.

If we then look at the Mural the Deacon is in the same pose, maybe this implies that this Organism is Sacreficed...

Is this to create the Xeno, or the orgins of the Xeno, or is this to create what we have in the Urns....

Is this showing us that bu using the same process they Sacreficed the Engineer to allow his genetic material to be able to mutate and evolve lifeforms to carry on and pass on his traits to such lifeforms.  The Alternative Alter/Mural shot showed us the Sacreficial Bowl on the Alter and not a Green Orb.  Could this had been the connection, in that the outpost was where they Sacreficed a Organism via same method as the Sacreficial Engineer only the broken down material is collected and stored in Urns?

Thats  my theory and one that matches what we see in Spaights draft as far as the Scarabs connection.....

This does not mean that Xeno is Sacreficed, it could be, but it could be some other Ancestor or relation that is Sacreficed to produce the Goo, and maybe futher experiments in the Goo lead to the Eggs.

But i dont think so, as the frescos show a traditional Xeno Egg being held by a Xeno, and also another organism that seem to be in a fetal pose next to a Engineer.

I would assume (and as Ridley said the Derelict had Cargo of Eggs and landed on LV 426 within few hundred years of the LV 223 outbreak) that the Eggs was around prior to the substance created within the Urns.

I would futher assume that the Engineers came across some Organism, the Xeno Egg, they realised what it did, and that it lead to a unconventional way to allow their race to bare a offspring in which they could not no longer do so naturally. Hense they used the Sacreficial Goo method.

They then worshiped in a way this life cycle, they may even had decided to use it as a Bio Weapon and also study it as a way for medical purposes to enhanced the Engineers or give them a ability they had long lost.

Weyland in the franchise are always after the Xeno for both a Bio Weapon and also Medical Applications and other genetics.

I feel the Mural shows us the resulting Organism that comes from a Face Hugged Engineer and it produces a Organism that is not quite the Deacon and not quite a Xeno...

They then using the Sacreficial Goo in how they could use the Engineers DNA to seed and evolve life to become in the image of Engineers, i recon that the Engineers on LV 223 may had sacreficed what ever comes from a Engineer that gets Face Hugged, i.e the Orginal Deacon.

This Organism is Sacreficed to produce a new susbtance that can ultimately be used to seed and evolve worlds to create a Organism or Mutations that carry both Engineer DNA and Xeno.

Shaws Deacon is slightly different because the Trilobite Face Huger was not a traditional one but one that was a Human/Xeno Hybrid and thus the Deacon has more Human qualities.

So in a nutshell, i dont think the Ancestor to the Xeno or its Orgins are something these Engineers created, i think they are something they came across and witnessed what happens and they then tried to re-weaponize it and also tried to carry out many experiments on said Organisms in the hope of creating a Organism that has the qualities of the Engineer with the traits of this Ancient Xeno Organism.

To be this makes sense, it ties in the Prometheus Goo and Spaights Scarabs, it ties in the orginal connection to the Star Beast Organism and the Giant Beings who fell victim to them.

Is this what is really happening?

Well Ridley did say if he did a Alien 5 he would explore the Alien Homeworld, did he mean Alien as in Space Jockey and thus Engineers or did he mean the Xeno, because if so then this means the Xeno is not indigenous to LV 223 or Paradise.

@Redant

Thats a good post and yes we have to consider what we see in the movies, but then it depends which cuts of the movies you see as each cut leads us to more clues that can take us down a differnt route to another.

Here are the basic concepts from all aspects...

1) Dan'Banon and co had the idea that there was some Ancient Organism that Sacreficed some other Organism to create another, this happened inside a Temple Complex/Pyramid. This Organism had a life Cycle that started as a Leathery Urn that contained a Octopoid Organism that implants a Embryo into a Host that produces a Organism that goes through a few stages untill it becomes Adult and then this Organism can then transform Hosts to create more Leathery Urns/Spores thus the Cycyle repeats.

A Giant Alien Race had landed on the planetoid containing said Temple and came across the Spores/Urns and tried to take them on board their ship to Study but fell prey to the Organism....

A Human Crew landed on the planetoid after intercepting a SOS from this Giant Races Ship and they also came foul to the Organism within the Temple.

2) Alien basically followed the same idea, the design changed somewhat but the basics was the same. Only difference was this Giant Alien Race was now carrying a Cargo of these Eggs and there was no Temple.... why he was carrying them is implied they was a Bio Weapon, but why they use them and how they came to have them or how they was created is not answered.

The Theatrical Release did not show a Egg Morph Scene and so did not explore how the Alien Life Cycle is repeated or how those Eggs could have came to be, where as the DC seemed to show they may had been created via a Morph Process via some Hosts, but then its very ambigious.

3) Aliens followed on to show us the Organism procreated via a Queen.

4) Prometheus comes in and shows us who the Space Jockey is and that this Humanoid Race created us via a strange substance, and that there is another strange substance within the Urns and that had Xeno DNA.  And this outpost LV 223 was being used by these Engineers to create and experiment with Bio Weapons..

The movie is very ambigious and we get there is some connection to the Goo in Urns and Xeno but we do not know in which way or what comes first.

5) Giger however had the idea from Alien and also did not like the Egg Morph route, as he prefered the idea that the ship was one Bio Mechanic Living Organism and that the Ship produced the Eggs.

And we are left not knowing the true outcome, but latter movies borrowed unused concepts of previous ones and their drafts.... for example Prometheus borrowed idea of the Temple from Star Beast and it was a place of Sacrefice to Procreate the Organism, but in Prometheus it was a place used to create or experiment with said Organism.

Could we thus see futher unused ideas from other Alien movies, be used in future ones?

Could the orgins actually take the form of some unused ideas, would it not be cool if the Orginal Eggs was produced by some living Bio Mechanical Machine just as Giger had envisioned?

Redant

Why do you think the engineers are half the size of the space jockey in alien ? 

Well I think if you just look at the films ull get nowhere.  It is all guess work for now I think one of the biggest clues is ridley saying this : "“From the very beginning, I was working from a premise that lent itself to a sequel. I really don’t want to meet God in the first one. I want to leave it open to [Dr. Elizabeth Shaw (Noomi Rapace)] saying, ‘I don’t want to go back to where I came from. I want to go where they came from… Because [the Engineers] are such aggressive f**kers, I always had it in there that the God-like creature that you will see actually is not so nice, and is certainly not God. I’d love to explore where [Dr. Shaw] goes next and what does she do when she gets there, because if it is paradise, paradise can not be what you think it is. Paradise has a connotation of being extremely sinister and ominous.” read it any way u want but I have my thoughts. ..

The film does not give us any clue, but with the scipts we can see some interesting points, especially with the Jon'screenplay: with the DNA of an ancient lifeform, wich was collected by black scarabs.

Unfortunately it is not canon, and what we see on screen is all we have. 

I also wonder if the black goo is the blood of some kind of god-like-creature or something, but that ' s just me, of course :p

Probably totally off topic, but I remember having seen something about a virulent contagion spread by xenomorph, in a early screeplay to Alien 3. There, Infected become xeno-like-creatures, results from mutations.

I just found it a bit like the concept that we see in Prometheus, and you can read the script here:

William Gibson's unused Alien 3 screenplay

@DJ, Yes! that quote is one of the best clues for now.

@Shambs..

Yes that Alien 3 script does have as i have said, seema to have some of its unused ideas that are then used in future movies. Each movie in franchise seems to borrow some unused concepts from a previous and Prometheus Mutation Elements could have got inspiration from that Alien 3 draft.

@djamelameziane

Indeed Ridley left us some interesting thoughts, just as he said if we was to do a Alien 5 he would visit the Alien homeworld... does he mean Xenos? He could meant Space Jockey.

Likewise by he did not want to meet God as being something other than Engineers but it could be the Elders, you see the Elder Scene was cut for a reason and he was not happy at the look of them and they did not seem so God like but frail.

Also a lot of the Engineer scenes got cut down, scenes that appeared to show the Engineer to be more than just a mindless thug hell bent on taking down mankind.

To me this points to a redesign to the Elders, and a portrayal that the Engineers are now intended to be mere servents created to perform tasks that the Elders no longer have to.  So yes similar to how David was created to serve Mankind.

We can not however rule out that their is some higher being or beings at the top of the hierarchy i.e above Engineers and Elders, and would these beings be Humanoid? or something else?

Who knows but i guess we would find out in Paradise.

They also built a cathedral dedicated to the creature

@Big Dave, considering the fact that they used a combination between that early Alien 3 screeplay and the Star Beast proyect; it is quite posible that there is still old material for the sequel, like the Dan O' Bannon' s original script (see the Svanya's Thread) which has some religious style elements in relation to the sacrifices and the life cycle of the monster.

@Oduodu,

"Redant Why do you think the engineers are half the size of the space jockey 
in alien ?"

This is such a good question! and know I not embarrassed by not seeing this observation at all. Good point Oduodu!

All I can say is when I watched the Prometheus film I thought wow so this how they are going to explain what the space jockey is underneath what was sitting in the chair on the ship in the Alien movie.

To me the Engineers' space suit looks like the space jockey. At this point I am not sure I can confidently say that the script writer and Scott had this intended purpose to make us think that the Engineers in their space suits are supposed to explain what the space jockey is; but, you have to admit they look really close. 

And yes yes yes I know the space jockey looks like it is all bones. Those bones look like they go right into the head right??? Yeah how about this for real problem. Remember the scene where they were reanimating the head. Well when they are looking at while it’s on the table they don't realize it is wearing a helmet till they scan it. I know, I am frustrated by all of this as well.

I just want this to be a bit easier and in some ways I love this stuff so much but I can't speculate on it so much either. I just want to enjoy everyone’s ideas and the films too, and my own. So when all this competes too much I just go with my gut instinct on this stuff. 

Redant

http://www.prometheus2-movie.com/community/forums/topic/27017

You might find this thread I started insightful.