It didn’t stop me from finishing Prometheus, but what grinds my gears is when the supposedly biologist was trying to pet the alien and it attacked him. Any trained biologist would know not to try to pet animals which you don’t know if it’s timid or not.
I find it unrealistic for any movie involving contact with aliens to not even consider how our and their microbial life would interact with each other. There should be a default rule of “oh you touched the alien? Ok, you will be the quarantine subject that we will monitor to make sure you haven’t caught some slow developing disease that will inevitably kill any earth life in your vicinity because we haven’t developed any kind of resistance to it”.
Except instead of “touched the alien” it would really have to be “entered their atmosphere with your ship” because the ship itself could bring back contaminants that would eventually destroy all life on our planet. And maybe even entering the atmosphere isn’t needed if microbial life occasionally gets swept into space by extreme weather, meteor interactions with the atmosphere, maybe solar ones also. Including this because it’s plausible that earth life originated elsewhere and was just seeded here by some event that allowed life to escape some other location and survive to come here. We’ve also had ships return to earth with life detectable on their outside–because someone on earth sneezed on it before it was launched and the microbial life wasn’t destroyed by being in space.
Similar line of thought when they go on the alien planet and just breathe the atmosphere because they detect oxygen.
Ironically it’s canon in even Alien (1979) and even a truck driver / pilot knows it. “Oh you got in contact with an alien organism? Sorry can’t let you on the ship.”
For some reason the cowboy style of the Prometheus. The sad thing is they could have written around these bad tropes but chose not to.
It didn’t stop me from finishing Prometheus, but what grinds my gears is when the supposedly biologist was trying to pet the alien and it attacked him. Any trained biologist would know not to try to pet animals which you don’t know if it’s timid or not.
I find it unrealistic for any movie involving contact with aliens to not even consider how our and their microbial life would interact with each other. There should be a default rule of “oh you touched the alien? Ok, you will be the quarantine subject that we will monitor to make sure you haven’t caught some slow developing disease that will inevitably kill any earth life in your vicinity because we haven’t developed any kind of resistance to it”.
Except instead of “touched the alien” it would really have to be “entered their atmosphere with your ship” because the ship itself could bring back contaminants that would eventually destroy all life on our planet. And maybe even entering the atmosphere isn’t needed if microbial life occasionally gets swept into space by extreme weather, meteor interactions with the atmosphere, maybe solar ones also. Including this because it’s plausible that earth life originated elsewhere and was just seeded here by some event that allowed life to escape some other location and survive to come here. We’ve also had ships return to earth with life detectable on their outside–because someone on earth sneezed on it before it was launched and the microbial life wasn’t destroyed by being in space.
Similar line of thought when they go on the alien planet and just breathe the atmosphere because they detect oxygen.
I don’t know why people forget even the first moon missions had a quarentine trailer/chamber used by the astronauts for this exact reason.
They were pretty sure they weren’t gonna find microbial life on the moon but they sure as hell weren’t gonna take the risk in case there actually was.
Ironically it’s canon in even Alien (1979) and even a truck driver / pilot knows it. “Oh you got in contact with an alien organism? Sorry can’t let you on the ship.”
For some reason the cowboy style of the Prometheus. The sad thing is they could have written around these bad tropes but chose not to.