No doubt it is a byproduct of the film Prometheus' terrible science (to match its accents, charisma-free actors and insipid plot), but the Vickers character (why cast Theron as anything other than the female lead, a surefire better bet than the rubbery brunette) tells the Captain that they're half a billion miles from men on Earth. That puts them at Jupiter.
It's one more strange or careless quirk of the Ridley Scott version of Alien- that the creatures are either in our solar system or very close to it. The Engineer hologram sequence- more at home in films like Sphere from the 1990s- seems to imply transgalactic scale. Perhaps it's just another example of that TV Trope bad science thing where science fiction gets its scales hopelessly wrong. But two years to get to Jupiter would make the low tech science of the film quite appropriate.
It's one more strange or careless quirk of the Ridley Scott version of Alien- that the creatures are either in our solar system or very close to it. The Engineer hologram sequence- more at home in films like Sphere from the 1990s- seems to imply transgalactic scale. Perhaps it's just another example of that TV Trope bad science thing where science fiction gets its scales hopelessly wrong. But two years to get to Jupiter would make the low tech science of the film quite appropriate.
