You may have heard that director Ridley Scott is following up ‘The Martian‘ with a sequel to his 2012 Alien prequel ‘Prometheus.’ Regular updates to the project have been making the rounds as the director and Prometheus’ cast do press for their various films. Here is Scott telling IGN one such update:

“Prometheus 2 will start getting shot in February and I’ve already begun now so I know what the script is. Then there will be another one after that and then maybe we’ll back into Alien 1, as to why? Who would make such a dreadful thing?”

‘Prometheus 2’ will reportedly be called ‘Alien: Paradise Lost’, driving home the connection to the old ‘Alien’ series. As each film comes out we’ll get closer to how things were at the beginning of ‘Alien.’ This means that we will see more hatching Xenomorphs and eventually an explanation for their existence. It’s already clear that the aliens are not a product of any natural process like evolution. They were created. The question is by whom? Scott goes on:

“I always thought of the Alien as a kind of piece of bacterial warfare. I always thought that that original ship, which I call the Croissant, was a battleship, holding these biomechanoid creatures that were all about destruction.”

Given some of the stuff humanity has created to further warfare, it’s no surprise that there is a common sci-fi trope to explore the logical progression of weaponry. Xenomorphs as weapons would be one of the more disturbing examples of this. ‘Prometheus‘ ends with Noomi Rapace’s character Elizabeth Shaw looking for the Engineers. We can imagine that this meeting will be a step towards understanding the aliens origins.

In other news, ‘Spectre’ and ‘Skyfall’ writer John Logan is joining in on the script writing for ‘Alien: Paradise Lost’, which will begin shooting in Australia after another half dozen of these updates come out.