I may have missed something , but how did we come up with the idea that the base

You must have missed the bit where Shaw stuck a probe into a dead Engineer and pronounced that he'd been dead for around 2,000 years.

Yep - aparantly you cant do that with carbon dating: [url=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tAJFQUUmPnA]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tAJFQUUmPnA[/url] but to be honest even I let that one pass - too obscure to be a mistake for me!

as its been said its when they test the engineers head 2000 years give or take is what they come up with But noone states the living engineer has been asleep for that length of time from what i can remember, think ppl have just assumed thats the case...dunno if it is or not though..

@dj: What the youtube guy got wrong was that there was actually no mention of carbon 14 in Prometheus. He's got a bee in his bonnet about something that was never mentioned. If they had said "where's the carbon-14 gadget" he might [i]just[/i] have a point. In Prometheus, they are dating the carbon (which [i]is[/i] mentioned) by measuring its neutrino scattering resonance differential. And as we all know, that's something that's determined by how long a carbon atom stays put in any kind of magnetic field. Alright, I made that last paragraph up. But you get my point. If you get irked by reading your own prejudices into things that aren't said, it's [i]you[/i] who has the problem, not the movie. @Frosty: Yes, it's an assumption that the other pile of Engineers died at the same time, as did the pals of the hibernating Engineer. Not an unreasonable assumption, I would say. That being the case, why would the hibernating Engineer have been asleep for donkey's years prior to those events happening.

I was intrigued as to why there was a doubt about the dating. Shaw asked for the carbon dating device (she said Carbon Dating) when they discovered the first engineer body, decapitated by the Ampule Chamber doors... So the attack and their deaths happened around 2000 years ago. Then assuming that pilot was in hypersleep for that lenght of time was an easy one. Maybe he was with the attacking force (I hope noth for I still hope to see a different force attacking them) or he was in the process of taking off when the attack came and were sabotaged (and he was left alive by mistake...) or they were the survivors trying to flee, although the images of those last aliens entering the bridge was not imbued of urgency, they were calmly talking...

Yes she does say ...do you have the carbon reader?...but I really dont care about this part enough there are far more bigger problems in this film...

Sure, but I was intrigued as to why the doubt...it was plainly clear how they got the approximate dates for that installation destruction... Fillers Thread XD

Isn't it possible advancements in CD had been done? Or are people forgetting it is sci-fi? David pretty much confirmed the Engineer had been in hypersleep for 2000 years by saying he was sure the crew would be impressed with the advanced technology of the sleep chambers when they first entered the room together.

The base itself must be older than 2,000 years. They say in the movie that the first dead engineer they find was dead app. 2,000 years, and this lets the audience assume that the events surrounding all of the engineers' deaths happened then. The crew from Promtheus naturally ask what happened. Shaw speculates an outbreak, Janek an accidental release of a WMD too dangerous for them to work with on their home world, and David learns it appeared they were about to leave for Earth. They were either stopped by someone wanting to stop that, or we just got very lucky. The former is more likely, because some engineers somewhere would likely have found out about the mission's failure unless it was never overseen or wanted by any engineers not from the base. In the sequel, we'll hopefully get to see who killed those engineers. They left the base unguarded which is one thing that supports the accident theory. It probably was an accident because that is what Janek says.