By the power of truth, I, while living, have conquered the universe.
Had you going there, didn't I? "Oh this bastard is making another canon thread, I can feel my pulse rising already!"
No, this is harkening back to a theory I had over a year ago when information on Reach was just a glint in the milkman's eye... I mean community. So let's begin...
Reach may be an artificial planet, or it may have seen some kind of artificial intervention at the hand of the Forerunners. Yeah, sounds crazy, but let us take a look.
I knew, right off the bat that something was up when I read this.
For a young planet with an age of less than one billion years, compared to Earth's 4.6 billion year existence, Reach is remarkably geologically stable.
Reach isn't even a billion years old at the time of the trilogy, and even the Forerunners inhabited it 100,000 years ago and it was stable. Now there's something I feel is being built upon on Reach that will prove to be significant for humanity.
1) The underground complex housing a slipspace crystal. This was interesting because what I got from Cryptum was that these crystals were almost the norm for Forerunner slipspace travel. Even the Master Builder had a massive crystal where the others all came from, so why is this particular one getting special treatment and being hidden underground? I'll come to that later.
2) The Babd Catha Ice Shelf was the location of a Forerunner data centre, also underground. We never got much information about it, but Halsey states it's a potential "game changer" for humanity, a "latchkey discovery". This poses a lot of questions. Latchkey implies this is unlocking something for humanity, and it's something big.
These two sites will be the primary basis for this theory. To me, it seems the Forerunners altered Reach for humanity in several ways.
So perhaps the reason the Forerunners chose Reach as their site for all this was because it was close to Earth, and by altering the planet to make it stable it would inevitably draw humanity's curiosity when they advanced to the point where they could colonise it.
It is interesting to note that Babd Catha is a goddess of war in Irish mythology. She represented an omen of a coming war which seems like all too much to be a coincidence for that name to be placed at an area with a "latchkey discovery" at it. This "oncoming war" obviously doesn't refer to the Covenant because that's been going on for 30 years, but as we very well know that Halo 4 is a new fight against an "ancient threat" that threatens the galaxy. This is where it gets interesting...
Let's say this new ancient threat is the Precursors. We simply know almost nothing about the Forerunner-Precirsor war, I find it hard to believe they got wiped out and Greg himself stated Book 2 of the Forerunner Trilogy will explore "what the Forerunners and Precursors were really up to". So we know something more was going on here.
This leads me to believe that their defeat at the hands of the Flood showed them that humanity were to be their Reclaimers and fight the Flood or Precursors when they inevitably return. So they left behind "objects of interest" at Reach, a planet that seems to be a bit of an anomaly to humanity because of how stable it is at an early age.
This harkens back to what Nazara says in Mass Effect:
Your civilisations are based off the technology of the Mass Relays - our technology. By using it, your society develops along the paths we desire."
Now I am not saying Halo is going to follow the same story of ME, but the principal is there. The Forerunners made humanity Reclaimers, they can use Forerunner tech to its fullest potential because they were chosen to inherit it. So in order to advance humanity they leave them a slipspace crystal and a mahoosive data centre containing information of great importance.
However, the AI Assembly do not want humanity using Forerunner technology. They purposefully excluded Onyx from being a colonisation candidate because they learned it had Forerunner technology on/in it and believed humanity needed to make their own technology. Also going back to ME, Legion holds a very similar ideal that the geth were offered technology by Nazara but the "true" geth declined because they believed they had to make their own future.
So let's connect this all together:
- Forerunners realise that an ancient threat will return (Flood? Precursors?) and after they fire Halo they make humanity Reclaimers.
- They find Reach, roughly 10.4 light years away from Earth and it's a very young planet. They artificially modify it so it becomes stable and humanity would grow curious when they notice the anomaly. To initiate their plan, the Forerunners hide the crystal and data centre (perhaps more, since Halsey states they never discovered the full extent of the caverns) in order to advance humanity. If the ancient threat was to return before the Forerunners predicted and found Reach, they decided to turn the surface into "a rugged and harsh wilderness filled with towering mountains, deserts and weather-beaten forests" - like the artificial weather on Halo designed to combat the Flood.
- Humanity advances again, but the Assembly think humanity should develop along their own path. The Minority and Majority have different ideas on how to achieve this, culminating in a tribunal for one of the AIs for initiating first contact between humanity and the Covenant.
- The Forerunner plan goes wrong. The crystal is destroyed, a fragment is in the hands of the Covenant and the data centre is destroyed. However, Halsey and Cortana managed to decrypt the data but never found out the true extent of what the Forerunners left for them under Menachite. Perhaps this is what leads humanity to reterraform Reach if it turns out Halsey escaped the Dyson Sphere and told ONI the complex needed to be explored further?
- The Assembly unanimously agrees to initiate direct intervention in humanity's path and work together with them instead of acting as shepherds.
- Mendicant Bias sends John to the Forerunners, the ancient threat returns and humanity has to defeat it.
*
Clearly this is all conjecture just based on information we have received. I'm sure I've missed things you lot can all add in.
I would like to thank grey for reminding me I ever came up with this theory last year. :)
[Edited on 07.06.2011 1:35 PM PDT]