- last post: 01.01.0001 12:00 AM PDT
Actually, why I don't go into my theories deals with time and sanity. Work is trying to kill me, methinks. Anyway, I do have enough time before I go in again to give a short synopsis.
Sumaria was either the first culture or close to it, and it sprung up out of nowhere. One day it wasn't, the next... "Hi! We're the Sumarians. Care to learn how to make bread?" I'm exaggerating, of course, but it gives an idea. Anyway, society was held together by the priests. You consulted them before doing anything. These priests had the ability to teach through song, but according to Snow Crash, it was much more than teaching. All humans have pretty much the same basic communication centers of the brain. What these priests did was access that directly through these songs, and download knowledge into the brain through that area of the brain. Sort of like a modem. So, in essence, people made bread because they were programmed to make it. (By the way, unless I say otherwise, this is all from Snow Crash.)
But wait, here comes the Tower of Babel. The priests were building a tower not to reach heaven, but were building, basicly, observatories. One inventive priest, or brain hacker if you will, got sick and tired of just saying the same songs. Nobody knew where the songs came from, other than "the gods." He got sick of the masses being mindless cattle, so he created a new nam-shub. Quite a feat, really. What this nam-shub did was scramble the language cortex a bit, so that nothing from the old songs would work, and so that the old songs could be used again. This had little side effects as well, but you can probably already guess those. Anyway, suddenly people had to THINK. "Er... Anybody know how to bake bread?" This had a devistating effect on Sumarian culture, but was good for history, because it gave rise to other empires.
There's a lot more stuff about Sumaria in there, but I have neither the time or the patience to hunt down my copy and explain it all. Go read the book, it's worth it if only for the reason that he hero is named Hiro Protagonist. Oh, and everybody listens to Reason.
Anyway, back to Halo. The Forerunners could have programmed the humans, and when they went "poof," the humans were left on their own. The most inventive of them collected to form Sumaria, if you want to take the Snow Crash route. Even if you don't, the basic programming remains there, just unable to be accessed directly. If you encounter a bit of Forerunner tech, you could know instinctively to "press this button to activate the device" or "this signal means something." Now, remember that an AI is based off of a human brain. ("Mmmm... Brains...")
Now, onto some other stuff. Remember in the game, GS says to MC "I'm glad to see that some of them survived to reproduce." He sounds like he's speaking about either the Forerunners or reclaimers. Either way, it looks like the forerunners were wiped out by the flood. (How, if the MC only has a suit rainking of 2 and he should have at least a twelve, is beyond me, because they should just plow through the Flood but we won't go there right now.) Of course, if it is a Forerunner on that happy-go-lucky iceball planet, hooo-boy. There goes our chances for a Halo 3. Unless, of course, we humans REALLY pissed it off.
As a side note, I wonder what a Hunter Flood would look like. We've seen human and elite, but notice how we see no grunt flood or any other kind?
Anyway, that's enough of my rambling. Time to go back to sculpting my mashed potatos and muttering "this means something" before going into work.