- last post: 01.01.0001 12:00 AM PDT
premise:
I think when bungie used the word sentient, they made the very common scifi mistake of misusing it for sapience. from wikipedia:
"Sentience is a capacity for basic consciousness—the ability to feel or perceive, not necessarily including the faculty of self-awareness, the ability for sapience is not a necessity. The word sentient is often confused with the word sapient, which can connote knowledge, higher consciousness, or apperception. The root of the confusion is that the word conscious has a number of different meanings in English. The two words can be distinguished by looking at their Latin roots: sentire, "to feel"; and sapere, "to know"."
this mistake is VERY common in scifi, so being the avid scifi fans that bungie are known to be, this mistake is very likely.
argument:
if that is the case, then the halos didn't kill off lower animals like bears or dogs or whathaveyou; only beings of higher intelligence like modern humans. thus the galaxy was wiped clean of all civilization when the halos fired. it just so happens the covies evolved a bit more quickly than we did.
further; i do believe earth is the ark, although not in the same way that most of you seem to. the forerunners were wiped out by the halos, that's pretty much set in stone. no i don't believe the earth protected anyone of higher intelligence. so what did the ark preserve, as in the definition of an ark? not the forerunners, but their legacy. us. it is my firm belief that before they fired the halos, they genetically engineered a promising species of ape to evolve into something like themselves. us. physiologically, modern man appears in the geological record something like 200,000 years ago, so i don't think it would be a big leap for the forerunners to enhance our intelligence and embed within our DNA a genetic memory of our progenitors/benefactors. and as stated above, we are not killed by the halos at the time because we are not yet sentient (according to the common scifi definition of the word).
they fire the halos and leave them to us to find. that's what the title 'reclaimer' means. we were meant to reclaim the legacy of our forefathers; the halos and all the technology they left behind. it just so happens, somewhere else in the galaxy another group of sentient beings evolve a little bit more quickly than we do; the Covenant.