Why the Engineers began cloning themselves. A hypothesis.

First posted as a comment on YouTube.

One of the possibilities for the Engineers giving up traditional reproduction might have been some kind of a biological accident.

If we assume, that after a series of upgrades comparable in fashion to Weyland-Yutani obsessively wanting to upgrade humanity, perhaps using the synthesized form of Black Goo as a possible active ingredient which the Engineers might have picked up somewhere else — either from the Deacon prototype stuck on the mural, or from the big head set in the urn chamber in the Pyramid on LV-223, or by combining both — biological reproduction then produced something awful (à la the Offspring).

The progenitors could probably no longer be fixed through state reversal, or that there was some other reason precluding any form of going back, and so, they resolved to cloning.

There may be a possibility for future stories, that the Engineer civilisation became dormant somewhere, hoping and waiting until a separate group of Engineers (maybe even that of LV-223) provides a resolution, or someone from the outside might.