Headscratchers / ARK: Survival Evolved

• Something that I'm having a hard time figuring out is the timeline of events for Genesis Part 1. The survivors are traveling on a spaceship but the end of Extinction clearly showed all the arks and the people inhabiting them landing on earth to fight the corruption. On a similar note, why is Rockwell on the spaceship, shouldn't he be on earth as well?
  • Rockwell is no longer a person, it's implied he has uploaded himself into the Aberration Ark and replaced its overseer, the Genesis Ark seems to not be a Fighting Force/Re-Colonization Ark, Judging by Rockwell's narration in the Part 2 trailer, the Genesis Ark is a literal Ark, to take some of the people and creatures to a new habitable planet, you know in case the whole "take Earth back from the corruption" thing doesn't work out, but it seems Rockwell managed to overtake that one as well.
  • Apparently, when Helena used a communication bridge to place HLN-A on the Genesis Ark, Rockwell followed her through the connection, because the Aberrant Ark landed near Arat Prime where the superluminal comms bridge was located. Given he was an Element-powered mutant cyborg by this point, it was likely a simple matter of tricking the system with his stolen Overseer credentials and upload his mind into the ship, leaving his broken Ark station behind. This spared the survivors on Earth from his influence, but nearly damned the occupants of the ship.
• One simple question: Why dinosaurs? I mean narrative wise, did the Arks used to be space-bourne wildlife preserves/vacation destinations?
  • Maybe modern animals were too “infected” with Element to be safe to use so they were force to use old dinosaur DNA from bones instead
  • My guess is that since prehistoric animals are generally viewed as more powerful than modern ones, they were chosen since their purpose on the arks is to both challenge the humans on-board to make them stronger and serve as war mounts when they finally land on Earth.
• Is it ever explained just how the makers of the arks managed to get ahold of the memories and personalities of people who have been dead for hundreds or even thousands of years?
  • Some of Santiago's lore notes and HLN-A's talks during Genesis focus on it. In the ARK universe, humans have a separate 'engrammic matrix', which acts somewhere between a store of memory and the soul, and it can sometimes be preserved after death. In the aftermath of the Element War, several transhumans made it a priority to create as broad a database as possible of as many people as possible, so in addition to scanning every then-living person (sometimes without consent), they dug up, sometimes literally, as many preserved engrams as possible. Given how overpowered the transhumans are, that was a pretty wide set of 'possible'. That said, it's not clear exactly how accurate some of the recreations are: one lore note mentions that a survivor was actually 'mixed' out of two engrams from drastically different time periods, and it's somewhat implied at least a few are as much best-guess reconstructions than actual copies.

---