- last post: 01.01.0001 12:00 AM PDT
The bulk of those 500 years was most likely spent on Space Travel. Faster than Light travel, at this point in time, is a scientific impossibility, it just can't be done. Hundreds of years of research was probably put into FTL travel. And at that point, as far as we knew, we were alone in the galaxy, so theres no use in developing high tech weapons.
And, as was said before, we had no need for them. The enemies we've been fighting before the Covenant were other humans with the same weapons, and when the Covenant did rear its ugly head, it pretty much started to wipe us out one planet at a time.
And not to mention the AI... it would take probably a million, maybe more, 100 gb hard drives to store the amount of information Cortana can. The advancements are there, they just arent in our weapons technology.
But thats just my opinion, i could be wrong