- last post: 01.01.0001 12:00 AM PDT
Posted by: Yossarian
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In fact, I'll go as far and suppose this: what if the Forerunner implanted some sort of genetic code around Earth and that code ended up being what flags Humans as Reclaimers?
P.S. One thing I'm curious about; if you kill the Flood by killing it's food, that indicates it can starve. Following that logic, once the Flood consume everything in the galaxy, they would no longer have food and would starve themselves to death. That makes no sense; either way the Flood loses. Could somebody shed some light on this?
This is an interesting theory (first sentence), and one which I have tossed around my own head. We have no real clues (that I am aware of) as to the time frame of the rings' previous activation, though logically, it would have come before the appearance of sustained, sizeable multicellular life on Earth (and covenant planets within reach of the Halo blast radius).
There is an interesting possibility here, in that Bungie may be playing off of our own mysterious pre-history. We had a mass extinction of species at the end of the Paleozoic era, this preceding an explosive proliferation of multicellular species, where only a small number existed (and vanished) before. Scientists are still struggling to explain the mass extinction (meteor?) and the subsequent rapid rise to dominance of multicellular and developmentally advanced animal species. There are tons of fun possibilities in here for the ambitious science-fiction (game) writer.
In the Halo world, this mass extinction may well be linked to the activation of the rings, followed or preceded by seeding of Earth with the genetic material required to rapidly respeciate the planet. Hmmm...
As for failing to destroy the flood through starvation, I don't see the problem, but then again, I'm an overly analytical biology geek. There are a number of proliferative parasitic species that consume massive numbers of hosts at utterly horrific rates. There are life forms that target specific insect species for egg laying, while the creature is still alive, and its young literally eat the critter alive from the inside out until they are able to wander off and repeat the process. Nature is just disgustingly unmerciful at times, and this is not pretty to watch.
The mechanism that prevents these parasites from causing their own extinction is the dispersal of hosts that results from thinning out host numbers with this activity and the activity of species that prey on the host species. The parasites' reproduction rate is drastically slowed by the inavailability of hosts, until the host population recuperates, falls under heavy parasitism again, and the cycle repeats. These are normal parasite-host population oscillations, which have been keeping real parasite species around for millenia. There's no reason this "reality" can't be transplanted into the world of Halo fiction.
Add to that an ability to exist in a state of dormancy (i.e. the little Flood bulbs on Halo), as many real creatures are able to do, and you have an extremely efficient parasitic species able to cope with its devastating effects on host populations, simply through its ability to go dormant while host populations recover - then the next mass-invasion begins again.
If that is the case, then the scary take home message is that the Flood are virtually unstoppable, unless a way is found to kill each and every Flood organism. MC has some serious Flood-whoopin' to do, or Bungie has another story arc to get going on.