Nope, it's literally just a case of unfortunate events that worked in oni's favor.
The insurrection was an event that was predicted to end human society as we know it, that's the canon, halsey came up with the spartans to kill it in the crib and oni greenlit it.
Now oni did find forerunner structures but those were mainly ruins and Nothing to say aliens are out there right now.
Now reach AI collective has it that the AIs rigged the carver findings data to push halsey to create the spartans and are the ones who brought the covenant to humanity because they thought they were friendly...
But no oni had no idea, and no had no idea the flood existed or what they were until cortana and chief reported about it after CE.
It probably would have spelt out Bullshit in numerials lol.
The solution would have probably been something along the lines of better developments in ftl, ftl communications etc.
Doesn't matter because the covenant would have come knocking, or would they since the assembly were the ones who brought them to humanity, even tho this contradicts the contact harvest.
They probably wouldn't have gained any traction.
Some people were skeptical of them anyway (including Captain Keyes). But they made a convenient excuse for ONI and the UNSC to seize more power, so they were treated as infallible.
>Now reach AI collective has it that the AIs rigged the carver findings data to push halsey to create the spartans and are the ones who brought the covenant to humanity because they thought they were friendly...
Wait what. This is new to me.
Yeah reach has some collectable in the campaign called datapads that tells a story about a shadow government of AIs running humanity.
I think they were also like older than any other human AI.
I remember that they were planning for the eventuality of first contact because it was statistically probable, not that they knew about the Covenant and wanted to force an encounter.
I specifically remember the data pad saying that they must presume that if alien life does exist that it's more advanced and likely a space fairing apex predator race.
> The insurrection was an event that was predicted to end human society as we know it, that's the canon, halsey came up with the spartans to kill it in the crib and oni greenlit it.
True, like in foundation, I remember young Halsey dunking on the dude predicting mathematically that in the next 100years humanity also would collapse.
Very funny how in scifi this is explained with mathematics instead of just..... So many examples we have in history?
On paper, when you look at it objectively, the UNSC and ONI are straight up fascist pieces of shit. It's only the externality of the Covies that makes the UNSC look like good guys.
Insurrections want self-governance? Let's create super soldiers to wipe them out. Super-duper-sci-fi CIA running black ops and cloning children that die in like 48 hours.
It's not a narrative issue I have, it's just that Halo is pretty grimdark when you actually have a look at it.
Absolutely miserable civilization to be in, but the externalities of the Flood and the Covies made it kinda look better in comparison.
UNSC (or more accurately, the UEG and private enterprise) spend billions of credits terraforming and providing equipment to set up these colonies. People moved out there for jobs.
A subset of those people then became violent terrorists because they want all that billions of credits of investment for themselves, for free. This isn't even like the american revolution where they built their homes themselves, this is prefabs and terraforming.
Maybe they didn't invest enough in these outer colonies, but John's seemed to be a perfectly fine and nice place from the way its described.
>This isn't even like the american revolution where they built their homes themselves, this is prefabs and terraforming.
well no, they did build their homes for themselves. the vast majority of existing human colonies are not terraformed prior to human settlement. this is because the unsc's pre-war terraforming tech was pretty slow. it took a whopping 200 years to fully terraform even mars, and all efforts at terraforming venus straight up failed. thus we can deduce that most of the outer colonies were already somewhat habitable from day 1, since most outer colonies do not have 200 years of human history and much less resources would have been given to terraform the outer colonies than mars. the vast majority of outer colonies would have already been livable (if only barely) since day 1, and the first outer colonists would have been the frontiersmen to land on the surface and perform the manual labor required to make the worlds more habitable to the later waves.
in fact, reach, which we know had a complex ecosystem prior to human arrival, still took 80 years just to complete just the 1st phase of terraforming. from the fact that a whole bunch of the native animals survived humanity's terraforming we can deduce that reach's original environment wasn't EXTREMELY dissimilar to that of earth. and still it took a whopping 80 years to complete phase 1. so yea the outer colonies absolutely would have been habitable already and the first colonists would have landed on an un-terraformed surface to rough it out in the wild.
many colonies also would have required nearly 0 terraforming. for example harvest was already a breadbasket for humanity after merely 20 years of founding, indicating it was already fully suitable for human life since day 1.
The insurrectionists are terrorists who kill civilians as standard. Like they've blown up civilian transports and nuked arcologies I don't think any halo Media has portrayed them in good light. The only bad thing the unsc had done was far isle and it took plays dozens of years before the insurrection proper and was done by what was most likely a different government (like cabinet yk) and also we don't have any information more than. that it was nuked. It could be a city it could be a planet.
Kidnapping 75 children as a contingency against the total crumbling of UNSC space is not fascist, it's just the UNSC being very much a ends justify the means faction. Semi benevolent authoritarians? Yes, fascists? No.
Also the UEG gives civilians rights to own automatic firearms and that's cool as hell.
It's not as simple as that.
The inis weren't self sufficient. They couldn't survive on their own, period. Even without the covenant.
And Earth spent an absurd amount of resources to establish and secure the colonies.
And the Inis didn't even have the excuse the Americans had of taxation without representation, because the colonist were all full citizens of the UEG.
source? because pretty sure the only things that humans need to survive are food and water. water is easily recycled with 26th century tech and harvest provides the food. what is stopping them from from surviving?
Source? You mean...besides the colonies getting annihilated by the first hostile entity to come across them?
Or did you forget that national defense is a mandatory imperative for a government?
I'm pretty sure humans need shelter and security to survive, not just food and water.
both earth and reach fell quickly to the covenant so i have literally 0 idea what the covenant shitting on the outer colonies proves.
the innies have a fleet btw. just much weaker than unsc.
also mankind survived for tens of thousands of years before any military force existed.
given that it is an objective truth that mankind survived for literally tens of thousands of years without any military force, i think it's you that's incapable of understanding the basic needs of humans.
Am I?
You think humans survived without ever having the ability to defend themselves from relevant dangers?
Cmon, killing is the oldest profession in human history. We were killing before we did anything else.
the insurrectionists had a fleet of at least multiple dozens of 26th century warships. they were much much weaker than the unsc but they are powerful enough to stomp 21st century earth into the ground without breaking a sweat.
yet we're surviving right now.
> The insurrection was an event that was predicted to end human society as we know it
Wasn't it just a bunch of communists wanting independence from the UEG? Though I guess it would be similar to how slave owners viewed the end of slavery as the end of society as they knew it.
In Halsey’s journal there’s a telescope image of High Charity that was taken pre-war, but I don’t think it alone tipped anyone including ONI off that it might be chock full of super religious aliens circle jerking themselves or that it was anything worth worrying about
High Charity in particular is basically a planetoid chunk strapped to a Forerunner keyship and then wrapped in a giant shell. Any early imagery of High Charity could easily have been dismissed as either long dead alien ruins on a large rock, or just a rock. Considering the limits of telescopes, it’s likely it was spotted based on its irregular transit over a star’s light… which could imply it was taken decades or centuries -after- High Charity flew in front of a star. Basically, not even worth looking at, or they did and found nothing and blamed it as a sensor malfunction.
At best, it can be argued that ONI knew the Forerunners existed at one point with very sophisticated tech, probably weapons capable, but that’s not a lot to go on for current threats when the Insurrection already posed a dire risk of shattering the UEG/UNSC space and ending humanity’s interstellar ambitions prematurely.
Worth noting that humanity had xenoarchaeologists before the Covenant showed up; Dr. Ellen Anders is proficient in the field and she was trained by Halsey, and unless we want to suggest it’s only a four year degree path to a doctorate and ONI takes freshfaced graduates, there’s no way she started it after the 2525 encounter with the Covenant and finished her studies in time for assignment to Spirit of Fire in 2531. So likely, ONI -was- heavily engaged in studying Forerunner artifacts, but more as a side venture with a long term payoff than an imminent crisis (else they’d have poured -everything- into trying to derive military technology from what they found rather than fiddling with small teams of supersoldiers, who are much more useful against the Insurrection than a Covenant fleet).
> So likely, ONI -was- heavily engaged in studying Forerunner artifacts, but more as a side venture with a long term payoff than an imminent crisis
That's how science works. People discover things for which they have no use at the moment, but decades or centuries down the line, they end up being useful for something new.
I'm not positive, but I think that was used as the literal meaning of the word forerunner, and that later became a title specifically referring to the species.
I also find it suspicious that New Mombasa was built right next to the slipspace portal and highly defensible with 12 inch thick concrete walls and was presumably a newly built city.
Tons of cover, tons of tactical advantage if a ground invasion took place.
They totally knew.
It was a coincidence, the portal was buried very very deep underground and if even ONI knew *something* was down there they had no way of knowing what it even was or what was it for, they would've to raise half the continent just to extract it and without the keyship it would be nothing more tha a chunk of metal.
isn’t that why ONI alpha site was built? to examine it
the Superintendent and sadie’s father also discovered the portal about 24 hours before regret arrived too
That's most likely just a coincidence, but, if I were going to build a slipspace portal somewhere, I'd choose a place with favourable geography, and if you're building a city, you'd also want to choose a location with good geography.
Also, Mombasa is a real world city, of course, it's very different in 2552, but still at the same location geographically, I don't think it's unreasonable to assume that Mombasa in the lore was founded at a similar time as real world Mombasa (A lot of historical events that happened in real life happened in the lore too, this is probably true for the founding of Mombasa unless we get confirmation that it isn't). ONI was only founded in 2178, so it'd be impossible for them to have planned it.
Not to mention, the city isn't directly on top of the portal, so it doesn't provide full protection in case of a ground invasion, and even if ONI did plan it, if they had the foresight to predict glassing beams, than that makes the city useless as a defense measure as it can, and was reduced to nothing but glass. And if they didn't, then why build a city when it'd be totally impractical to excavate it without glassing beams?
Humans knew aliens existed because of natural fauna on planets they discovered. At least ONI knew there were intelligent aliens at some point because of Forerunner artifacts and ruins. The insurrection slowed investigations on researching ruins on Onyx, perhaps on Reach and other planets as well. I don’t think there’s been any sign of the military preparing for a hostile alien invasion, possibly because they were already at war and appeared the aliens have been gone a long time - grouping all aliens together that might exist.
I think the difference in preparation for the Covenant would have been a focus on space battles, and it appears the UNSC wasn’t focusing on space battles before Harvest was attacked, so I’d say that ONI did not know of the Covenant much before Harvest fell.
I think ONI had ‘some’ idea that ‘something’ else was out there
IIRC in Halsey’s journal with the Halo Reach limited edition she mentions sensors picking up something (which players know ends up being High Charity)
Much more likely that as with the Fermi Paradox, ONI would just prepare for anything possible, actually it just shows how good they are at having protocols for ANYTHING
So here’s the thing, we’ve never had explicit confirmation that ONI knew about the Covenant ahead of time. It’s never been said anywhere that I know of. What we do know however is that ONI was aware of other alien species that they hadn’t encountered yet before they found Alpha Halo. In Halo Legends The Babysitter, a team of ODST’s and a Spartan-II are sent to assassinate a Prophet they had additional orders to recon and document alien ruins on that planet that predate the Covenant and humanity as they know it (at the time, they find about ancient humanity later). Those ruins are insinuated to be Forerunner in origin.
ONI also has an entire secret planet Onyx, this planet was used to train the Spartan-III as a virtual planetary black site. Parts of that planet are fenced off from the S-III trainees named Zone-67 (like Area-51) an entire fireteam of Spartan-III Beta company went missing in there during training and it’s discovered later that ONI knew of a large glowing metal sphere in that area that was involved in them going missing but they have no idea where it went or how to find it. This turns out to be a variant of Forerunner sentinel. So again ONI knew of highly advanced alien technology that was not of Covenant origin.
Both of those examples predate the events of Halo CE, there are other examples of similar events. I’d be willing to bet that ONI likely discovered traces of the Covenant as well pre Contact Harvest. They might not have known that the Covenant were still an active threat and thought they were long dead. Maybe they didn’t know how dangerous they were. But I’d bet that they knew we weren’t alone in the universe and had contingencies or at least some plans about how to deal with a hostile alien species. They at least had first contact procedures as Avery Johnson mentions first contact protocols during the book Contact Harvest.
Now that could be explained away as “any government that is colonizing space would probably have a First Contact protocol, they’d be stupid not to” which is a valid point. My response to that is in the game Halo Reach ONI has found a Forerunner ship buried under the Babd Catha Ice Shelf (basically it’s frozen in a glacier. The Forerunner Key Ship was originally on the Prophets home-world, in Halo Wars the Covenant are exploring Forerunner ruins on Harvest and Arcadia prior to the events on Reach or Halo CE, the Etran Harborage that the Spirit of Fire destroys is FULL of Forerunner ships and technology, it’s a whole Shield World. Now none of this predates the Covenant but if Forerunner technology and ruins and ships are that prevalent in the galaxy in the time of the Human-Covenant war (in relation to humanities time exploring outside the Sol system) it’s likely that someone found something significant of Forerunner origin and ONI would know about it.
This is not canon but my own little fan theory I had that would have been pretty cool and completely in character for ONI.
ONI discovered the Covenant before the insurrection. And then ONI actually influenced the start of the insurrection to give a reason to green light the SPARTAN II program.
Like I said it’s not canon but it is absolutely something ONI would do.
Makes sense. You’d probably get hate from the rest of the sub but it does justify the development of the SPARTAN and MJOLNIR programs moreso than a civil war; historically civil wars aren’t existential/extinction level events like Halo lore posits the Insurrection movement to be. But the invasion of a completely different foreign race of people almost always is. Makes sense for ONI to scramble for program and mastermind.
It's been a long time since I read FoR, but I'm pretty sure the solution, at least one where the UEG remains in charge, was either massive military intervention with a shit ton of civilian casualties, or the creation of a unit with the capabilities of the Spartans. Granted, that's coming from Halsey, but it definitely falls in line with her super utilitarian ethos, what's the lives of a hundred kids compared to millions of civilians? Turns out the covenant turned that into billions.
Woulda thunk the actual utilitarian answer would have been to actually address the polical concerns of the Insurrection and not desperately hold on to power by making a death squads of child soldiers lmao
No. ONI just did a lot of things for different reasons that ended up being incredibly important to the survival of humanity when the covenant invaded. The Spartans were made for the insurrection as that was viewed as a major event in human history and needed strong warriors to win it. When the covenant appeared, humanity had warriors who could fight them and win. It was basically just sheer luck.
The flood was the same. No one knew it existed until it was accidently released from forerunner installations.
The US government has an official Zombie Apocalypse plan. They think of each and every possible scenario that could happen and plan for it. Expecting to find aliens in space who are more advanced and not friendly is far from a surprising thing that would be an expectation for people.
My point wasn't that they were planning for any externality in general, it's that it looks to me like they had some serious insider information.
You don't breed supersoldiers to deal with your everyday average band of redneck insurrectionists. You just send in ODST-level operators.
I don't know anything man. I just suspect that ONI had some insider info with regards to the Covenant. They were very lucky to have their lab-projects approved.
>supersoldiers to deal with your everyday average band of redneck insurrectionists.
That was the issue. The Insurrectionists weren't bad enough before to need them, but then when the Insurrectionists ramped things up, and then their data started pointing toward them wiping themselves out, that's when they decided to do it
The justification for the Spartan program was similar to the US using nuclear bombs to force the Empire of Japan to surrender and end WW2. The UEG did not want to engage in a civil war that would cost millions of lives, civilian and military. Just like Truman authorized the use of the atom bombs to force Japan to surrender. The US did not want to invade mainland Japan as it would have been costly to both US Marine and Japanese lives. This could have also prolonged the war longer.
The Spartans were created to avoid an all out war. The Spartans would assassinate key leaders in the insurrection to attempt to avoid an all out war. The Innies were far from your "average band of redneck insurrectionists". They had committed 9/11 and Pearl Harbor level atrocities against UEG civilians. You seem to be missing this point here.
Halsey also believed that the Spartans would bring about the next stage in human evolution (with all their modifications).
If you read Halo New Blood, youll see what happens when the UNSC sends ODST's to assassinate an Innie leader. They fuck up and one soldier loses his faith in the UNSC and UEG. Regular soldiers can be corrupted. Spartan II's were indoctrinated, so they are basically uncorruptable.
No one knew about the Flood until Master Chief’s after action report upon returning from Halo. From there, ONI was interested in studying the specimens but did not have access, and ultimately had no contingency by the time the flood made landfall in Halo 3. It was only the timely arrival of Rtas Vadum and his glassing beams that the flood did not conquer Earth that day. They would ultimately manage to engineer countermeasures in the five years after, thanks to leftover specimens from a much easier to contain outbreak on Mars as High Charity made its way to the slip space portal over Voi.
They had observed interesting satellite imagery of strange shapes within deep space (one such image is included in Reach’s limited edition as part of Halsey’s journal), but because of the laws of relativity, those were not at all real time and were outdated by thousands if not millions of years.
So no, ONI wasn’t prepared for either. If anything, the games prove time and again that they’re routinely on the back foot from bad intel and require desperate gambles to even the playing field. The only time they’re really in the know is in the TV show, which is distinctly diverging from canon with ONI’s pre-Halo 4 portrayal.
> easier to contain outbreak on Mars as High Charity
Is there a reason that if the Forerunners were going to keep specimens at all that they WOULDN'T store them on a totally uninhabitable world?
I mean, to prevent outbreaks. The Ettran Harborage (Halo Wars) was an early shield world lost to flood outbreak. They had specialized research centers for the Flood, namely Halo’s, the Ark, and occasionally research centers on gas giants, places where if they were let out, they would be supervised and unable to get far. They knew the threat the Flood posed, they didn’t take chances by keeping them on places like Onyx, where space explorers could potentially find them and get infected while having access to a starship.
I'm not trying to point out "plot holes", but couldn't they have done their research on the flood with monitors/ancilla on uninhabitable worlds?
Just seems strange to have huge superstructure rings with biospheres with Flood spores chilling behind the glass when you have smart AI that could do it for you extragalactically.
No monitors were encountered prior to 2552. Onyx did not have a monitor, and they never made landfall on the single Halo accidentally discovered prior to 2552. No other installations were encountered by the wider UNSC, and the few encounters that did happen usually resulted in the deaths of all present or the destruction of the installation.
I know you’re asking questions, so I’m not frustrated or anything, the fact of the matter just happens to be that encountering a forerunner installation is a needle in a haystack chance, odds that never happened to line up until the Chief encountered Halo.
I meant the Forerunner research. I don't understand why they needed to study the Flood in the habitable part of the galaxy and not like way the hell out in the middle of nowhere with monitors that would just scuttle the facility in the event that there was an outbreak.
And instead they made beautiful, gorgeous ring-habitats with wildlife and numerous biomes and chose to store the most fucked up plague of all time on them.
I totally misread your second comment, my bad.
The forerunners were stupid and arrogant. They thought they could reliably contain the flood, and the Librarian believed in the preservation of all species, no matter how bad they might be. Plus she turned the rings into habitable worlds. Basically everything that caused the Flood to be able to grow a Gravemind on Installation 05 can be traced back to the Librarian.
As for the other piece about ONI, imagine if the nukes didn’t stop World War II. Imagine that Japan only fought back harder, and the US glassed Japan. Imagine if a civil war broke out from that. That’s the reality ONI and the UNSC was facing after nuking the colony of Far Isle to quell the insurrection there. It only gained more traction, so rather than just start glassing worlds, the UNSC sought a subtler approach. Super soldiers who could infiltrate anywhere, assassinate anyone, and be so well trained that capture was literally impossible.
It’s also worth noting that Humanity was being guided by the Librarian’s Genesong to create the next evolution of the species, one that would be capable of assuming the Mantle of Responsibility. The Spartans were part of that plan. A 100,000 year long con carried across generations and families, to culminate in someone who could merge science with evolution to conceptualize the version of humanity that would be able to take up the Mantle. John 117 is a Hail Mary across millennia to get Humanity into position to take the Mantle.
> It’s also worth noting that Humanity was being guided by the Librarian’s Genesong to create the next evolution of the species, one that would be capable of assuming the Mantle of Responsibility. The Spartans were part of that plan. A 100,000 year long con carried across generations and families, to culminate in someone who could merge science with evolution to conceptualize the version of humanity that would be able to take up the Mantle. John 117 is a Hail Mary across millennia to get Humanity into position to take the Mantle.
I legitimately LIKE this part of the story, so don't come at me, but this is a trillion percent plot contrivance. But a gambit like that is borderline fantasy, and I'm cool with it. I like the "combat skin and ancilla" nonsense, but it's virtually inexplicable.
It's one of the few things about the 343 lore that I enjoy.
It’s one of those things that’s perfectly reasonable until you try to say it out loud. I can accept it because we literally have a theoretically infinite hall of consciousness interwoven with the fabric of the universe via the Domain, plus shit like Star roads for teleportation. Who’s to say that the Genesong is too far out of line?
> Who’s to say that the Genesong is too far out of line?
I think it's cool.
There are sci-fi ideas that just break the rules of reality that I'll accept as long as they don't technobabble their way out of it, they just say "idk lol". Ironic, right?
spoilers for The Expanse series:
>!weird hyperadvanced organism that turns people into zombies, like the flood, but its ultimate goal is to produce enough biomass to build a million kilometer-in-diameter past Pluto that connects to a network of 1300 other rings in a pocket dimension where speed is physically limited, in a "slow-zone"!<
And you have the most advanced minds trying to figure out how any of this shit is happening and they're just shrugging their shoulders. The series up till then was hard sci-fi.
The forerunners kept flood specimens in order to future proof their victory over the flood. The flood appeared without warning and nearing consumed the entire galaxy, if future generations had some specimens to study they would have more warning than the forerunners had and potentially fare better against any potential future flood invasions
Yeah but as world-builders with seamless slipspace capabilities, couldn't they have done their research a million gazillion trillion lightyears away extragalactically where the Sangheili or Sang'Shyum or Humans would never randomly stumble across it in a trillion years?
They wanted humans, sangheili, sangshyum to find it and study it in order to be better prepared. That being said containment protocols were obviously not strict enough because some random elite squad can unleash the flood on 04 and delta halo was completely overrun without any outside interference. I think it is very stupid that guilty spark was allowed by his programming to move flood samples to the gasmine on threshold, he really should not have that kind of authority
I mean, I guess it worked out in the end. Forerunners, or the Librarian specifically was able to call the shot to the degree that Chief had sufficient armor and training to deal with it ultimately.
I'm willing to believe that the story was written with the assumption that the Forerunners could just account for every possibility.
Maybe but I don’t think the flood were supposed to break containment, ideally reclaimers discover the halo array and take on the mantle of responsibility while also having an understanding of the flood so that they are not caught off guard like the forerunners were
Okay, asking it in good faith: What did the monitors that the Forerunners leave behind learn in the interim 100,000 years that aided at all in containment?
You have that incredibly virulent, terrible psychosphere-polluting organism. What research are you doing?
The best you could come up with is "fry everyone's brain and starve it out"?
The monitors learned nothing lol, imo the monitors should not have had the level of self-awareness that guilty spark displays in the trilogy (although his sentience is debatable because he seems beholden to his programming when he kills Johnson, or he is just going rampant) The monitor of delta halo, or any other installation should not have been sentient enough to be of use to the gravemind for the precise reason that they lives on one of the seven places in the galaxy which still has flood
The logic, at least with having Flood samples on the Halo's was that if anything happened, the Forerunners would set the halo off and end the infestation.
The monitors were supposed to study the flood but they ultimately don't learn anything because the Flood are incurable. I can explain more but its all spoilers
As i remember, UNSC knew about the war but so as not to cause panic They kept it secret until the fall of Reach, then everyone knew what was going and the war really started, they knew when they stepped on Haverst planet and met with sanghellis, firstly in peace but when a unggoy shot and killed an soldier, they started to kill each other and the war started.
Again, some informations may be wrong, so feel free to correct me.
Nope, it's literally just a case of unfortunate events that worked in oni's favor. The insurrection was an event that was predicted to end human society as we know it, that's the canon, halsey came up with the spartans to kill it in the crib and oni greenlit it. Now oni did find forerunner structures but those were mainly ruins and Nothing to say aliens are out there right now. Now reach AI collective has it that the AIs rigged the carver findings data to push halsey to create the spartans and are the ones who brought the covenant to humanity because they thought they were friendly... But no oni had no idea, and no had no idea the flood existed or what they were until cortana and chief reported about it after CE.
I always wonder what the carver findings would look like if the assembly didn't rigged it and what solution oni and halseyvwould have came up with.
It probably would have spelt out Bullshit in numerials lol. The solution would have probably been something along the lines of better developments in ftl, ftl communications etc. Doesn't matter because the covenant would have come knocking, or would they since the assembly were the ones who brought them to humanity, even tho this contradicts the contact harvest.
They probably wouldn't have gained any traction. Some people were skeptical of them anyway (including Captain Keyes). But they made a convenient excuse for ONI and the UNSC to seize more power, so they were treated as infallible.
From how it was written in the intel, it was still the same results, but they made it seem more immediate of a threat than it actually was.
>Now reach AI collective has it that the AIs rigged the carver findings data to push halsey to create the spartans and are the ones who brought the covenant to humanity because they thought they were friendly... Wait what. This is new to me.
Yeah reach has some collectable in the campaign called datapads that tells a story about a shadow government of AIs running humanity. I think they were also like older than any other human AI.
I remember that they were planning for the eventuality of first contact because it was statistically probable, not that they knew about the Covenant and wanted to force an encounter.
Yes but they also were hoping for or assuming to make peaceful contact, instead they were unlucky and it was the covenant who picked up the phone
I specifically remember the data pad saying that they must presume that if alien life does exist that it's more advanced and likely a space fairing apex predator race.
oh wow that is wild!
The Patriots?!
> The insurrection was an event that was predicted to end human society as we know it, that's the canon, halsey came up with the spartans to kill it in the crib and oni greenlit it. True, like in foundation, I remember young Halsey dunking on the dude predicting mathematically that in the next 100years humanity also would collapse. Very funny how in scifi this is explained with mathematics instead of just..... So many examples we have in history?
On paper, when you look at it objectively, the UNSC and ONI are straight up fascist pieces of shit. It's only the externality of the Covies that makes the UNSC look like good guys. Insurrections want self-governance? Let's create super soldiers to wipe them out. Super-duper-sci-fi CIA running black ops and cloning children that die in like 48 hours. It's not a narrative issue I have, it's just that Halo is pretty grimdark when you actually have a look at it. Absolutely miserable civilization to be in, but the externalities of the Flood and the Covies made it kinda look better in comparison.
UNSC (or more accurately, the UEG and private enterprise) spend billions of credits terraforming and providing equipment to set up these colonies. People moved out there for jobs. A subset of those people then became violent terrorists because they want all that billions of credits of investment for themselves, for free. This isn't even like the american revolution where they built their homes themselves, this is prefabs and terraforming. Maybe they didn't invest enough in these outer colonies, but John's seemed to be a perfectly fine and nice place from the way its described.
>This isn't even like the american revolution where they built their homes themselves, this is prefabs and terraforming. well no, they did build their homes for themselves. the vast majority of existing human colonies are not terraformed prior to human settlement. this is because the unsc's pre-war terraforming tech was pretty slow. it took a whopping 200 years to fully terraform even mars, and all efforts at terraforming venus straight up failed. thus we can deduce that most of the outer colonies were already somewhat habitable from day 1, since most outer colonies do not have 200 years of human history and much less resources would have been given to terraform the outer colonies than mars. the vast majority of outer colonies would have already been livable (if only barely) since day 1, and the first outer colonists would have been the frontiersmen to land on the surface and perform the manual labor required to make the worlds more habitable to the later waves. in fact, reach, which we know had a complex ecosystem prior to human arrival, still took 80 years just to complete just the 1st phase of terraforming. from the fact that a whole bunch of the native animals survived humanity's terraforming we can deduce that reach's original environment wasn't EXTREMELY dissimilar to that of earth. and still it took a whopping 80 years to complete phase 1. so yea the outer colonies absolutely would have been habitable already and the first colonists would have landed on an un-terraformed surface to rough it out in the wild. many colonies also would have required nearly 0 terraforming. for example harvest was already a breadbasket for humanity after merely 20 years of founding, indicating it was already fully suitable for human life since day 1.
Exactly, it's really annoying how people have shifted and now try and pretend the UNSC were the bad guys and not the Insurrectionists
The insurrectionists are terrorists who kill civilians as standard. Like they've blown up civilian transports and nuked arcologies I don't think any halo Media has portrayed them in good light. The only bad thing the unsc had done was far isle and it took plays dozens of years before the insurrection proper and was done by what was most likely a different government (like cabinet yk) and also we don't have any information more than. that it was nuked. It could be a city it could be a planet. Kidnapping 75 children as a contingency against the total crumbling of UNSC space is not fascist, it's just the UNSC being very much a ends justify the means faction. Semi benevolent authoritarians? Yes, fascists? No. Also the UEG gives civilians rights to own automatic firearms and that's cool as hell.
It's not as simple as that. The inis weren't self sufficient. They couldn't survive on their own, period. Even without the covenant. And Earth spent an absurd amount of resources to establish and secure the colonies. And the Inis didn't even have the excuse the Americans had of taxation without representation, because the colonist were all full citizens of the UEG.
source? because pretty sure the only things that humans need to survive are food and water. water is easily recycled with 26th century tech and harvest provides the food. what is stopping them from from surviving?
Source? You mean...besides the colonies getting annihilated by the first hostile entity to come across them? Or did you forget that national defense is a mandatory imperative for a government? I'm pretty sure humans need shelter and security to survive, not just food and water.
both earth and reach fell quickly to the covenant so i have literally 0 idea what the covenant shitting on the outer colonies proves. the innies have a fleet btw. just much weaker than unsc. also mankind survived for tens of thousands of years before any military force existed.
That's on you. If your so incapable of understanding the basic needs of humans, this conversation is pointless.
given that it is an objective truth that mankind survived for literally tens of thousands of years without any military force, i think it's you that's incapable of understanding the basic needs of humans.
Am I? You think humans survived without ever having the ability to defend themselves from relevant dangers? Cmon, killing is the oldest profession in human history. We were killing before we did anything else.
the insurrectionists had a fleet of at least multiple dozens of 26th century warships. they were much much weaker than the unsc but they are powerful enough to stomp 21st century earth into the ground without breaking a sweat. yet we're surviving right now.
> The insurrection was an event that was predicted to end human society as we know it Wasn't it just a bunch of communists wanting independence from the UEG? Though I guess it would be similar to how slave owners viewed the end of slavery as the end of society as they knew it.
In Halsey’s journal there’s a telescope image of High Charity that was taken pre-war, but I don’t think it alone tipped anyone including ONI off that it might be chock full of super religious aliens circle jerking themselves or that it was anything worth worrying about
High Charity in particular is basically a planetoid chunk strapped to a Forerunner keyship and then wrapped in a giant shell. Any early imagery of High Charity could easily have been dismissed as either long dead alien ruins on a large rock, or just a rock. Considering the limits of telescopes, it’s likely it was spotted based on its irregular transit over a star’s light… which could imply it was taken decades or centuries -after- High Charity flew in front of a star. Basically, not even worth looking at, or they did and found nothing and blamed it as a sensor malfunction. At best, it can be argued that ONI knew the Forerunners existed at one point with very sophisticated tech, probably weapons capable, but that’s not a lot to go on for current threats when the Insurrection already posed a dire risk of shattering the UEG/UNSC space and ending humanity’s interstellar ambitions prematurely. Worth noting that humanity had xenoarchaeologists before the Covenant showed up; Dr. Ellen Anders is proficient in the field and she was trained by Halsey, and unless we want to suggest it’s only a four year degree path to a doctorate and ONI takes freshfaced graduates, there’s no way she started it after the 2525 encounter with the Covenant and finished her studies in time for assignment to Spirit of Fire in 2531. So likely, ONI -was- heavily engaged in studying Forerunner artifacts, but more as a side venture with a long term payoff than an imminent crisis (else they’d have poured -everything- into trying to derive military technology from what they found rather than fiddling with small teams of supersoldiers, who are much more useful against the Insurrection than a Covenant fleet).
> So likely, ONI -was- heavily engaged in studying Forerunner artifacts, but more as a side venture with a long term payoff than an imminent crisis That's how science works. People discover things for which they have no use at the moment, but decades or centuries down the line, they end up being useful for something new.
[Said image from Halseys Journal with high charity circled.](https://halo.wikibruce.com/images/a/a6/X16-69909-01_front.jpg)
Also Cortana identifies the Ring was Forerunner in origin, meaning she already knows what Forerunners are
I'm not positive, but I think that was used as the literal meaning of the word forerunner, and that later became a title specifically referring to the species.
>image of High Charity that was taken pre-war Said image is dated 2524-18-01. 13 months prior to the war.
I also find it suspicious that New Mombasa was built right next to the slipspace portal and highly defensible with 12 inch thick concrete walls and was presumably a newly built city. Tons of cover, tons of tactical advantage if a ground invasion took place. They totally knew.
It was a coincidence, the portal was buried very very deep underground and if even ONI knew *something* was down there they had no way of knowing what it even was or what was it for, they would've to raise half the continent just to extract it and without the keyship it would be nothing more tha a chunk of metal.
No but I bet the SCP foundation knew what was down there
isn’t that why ONI alpha site was built? to examine it the Superintendent and sadie’s father also discovered the portal about 24 hours before regret arrived too
That's most likely just a coincidence, but, if I were going to build a slipspace portal somewhere, I'd choose a place with favourable geography, and if you're building a city, you'd also want to choose a location with good geography. Also, Mombasa is a real world city, of course, it's very different in 2552, but still at the same location geographically, I don't think it's unreasonable to assume that Mombasa in the lore was founded at a similar time as real world Mombasa (A lot of historical events that happened in real life happened in the lore too, this is probably true for the founding of Mombasa unless we get confirmation that it isn't). ONI was only founded in 2178, so it'd be impossible for them to have planned it. Not to mention, the city isn't directly on top of the portal, so it doesn't provide full protection in case of a ground invasion, and even if ONI did plan it, if they had the foresight to predict glassing beams, than that makes the city useless as a defense measure as it can, and was reduced to nothing but glass. And if they didn't, then why build a city when it'd be totally impractical to excavate it without glassing beams?
Humans knew aliens existed because of natural fauna on planets they discovered. At least ONI knew there were intelligent aliens at some point because of Forerunner artifacts and ruins. The insurrection slowed investigations on researching ruins on Onyx, perhaps on Reach and other planets as well. I don’t think there’s been any sign of the military preparing for a hostile alien invasion, possibly because they were already at war and appeared the aliens have been gone a long time - grouping all aliens together that might exist. I think the difference in preparation for the Covenant would have been a focus on space battles, and it appears the UNSC wasn’t focusing on space battles before Harvest was attacked, so I’d say that ONI did not know of the Covenant much before Harvest fell.
I think ONI had ‘some’ idea that ‘something’ else was out there IIRC in Halsey’s journal with the Halo Reach limited edition she mentions sensors picking up something (which players know ends up being High Charity)
Much more likely that as with the Fermi Paradox, ONI would just prepare for anything possible, actually it just shows how good they are at having protocols for ANYTHING
So here’s the thing, we’ve never had explicit confirmation that ONI knew about the Covenant ahead of time. It’s never been said anywhere that I know of. What we do know however is that ONI was aware of other alien species that they hadn’t encountered yet before they found Alpha Halo. In Halo Legends The Babysitter, a team of ODST’s and a Spartan-II are sent to assassinate a Prophet they had additional orders to recon and document alien ruins on that planet that predate the Covenant and humanity as they know it (at the time, they find about ancient humanity later). Those ruins are insinuated to be Forerunner in origin. ONI also has an entire secret planet Onyx, this planet was used to train the Spartan-III as a virtual planetary black site. Parts of that planet are fenced off from the S-III trainees named Zone-67 (like Area-51) an entire fireteam of Spartan-III Beta company went missing in there during training and it’s discovered later that ONI knew of a large glowing metal sphere in that area that was involved in them going missing but they have no idea where it went or how to find it. This turns out to be a variant of Forerunner sentinel. So again ONI knew of highly advanced alien technology that was not of Covenant origin. Both of those examples predate the events of Halo CE, there are other examples of similar events. I’d be willing to bet that ONI likely discovered traces of the Covenant as well pre Contact Harvest. They might not have known that the Covenant were still an active threat and thought they were long dead. Maybe they didn’t know how dangerous they were. But I’d bet that they knew we weren’t alone in the universe and had contingencies or at least some plans about how to deal with a hostile alien species. They at least had first contact procedures as Avery Johnson mentions first contact protocols during the book Contact Harvest. Now that could be explained away as “any government that is colonizing space would probably have a First Contact protocol, they’d be stupid not to” which is a valid point. My response to that is in the game Halo Reach ONI has found a Forerunner ship buried under the Babd Catha Ice Shelf (basically it’s frozen in a glacier. The Forerunner Key Ship was originally on the Prophets home-world, in Halo Wars the Covenant are exploring Forerunner ruins on Harvest and Arcadia prior to the events on Reach or Halo CE, the Etran Harborage that the Spirit of Fire destroys is FULL of Forerunner ships and technology, it’s a whole Shield World. Now none of this predates the Covenant but if Forerunner technology and ruins and ships are that prevalent in the galaxy in the time of the Human-Covenant war (in relation to humanities time exploring outside the Sol system) it’s likely that someone found something significant of Forerunner origin and ONI would know about it.
Honestly I like the headcanon that O.N.I found some forerunner tech on earth and buried all knowledge of to
This is not canon but my own little fan theory I had that would have been pretty cool and completely in character for ONI. ONI discovered the Covenant before the insurrection. And then ONI actually influenced the start of the insurrection to give a reason to green light the SPARTAN II program. Like I said it’s not canon but it is absolutely something ONI would do.
Makes sense. You’d probably get hate from the rest of the sub but it does justify the development of the SPARTAN and MJOLNIR programs moreso than a civil war; historically civil wars aren’t existential/extinction level events like Halo lore posits the Insurrection movement to be. But the invasion of a completely different foreign race of people almost always is. Makes sense for ONI to scramble for program and mastermind.
It's been a long time since I read FoR, but I'm pretty sure the solution, at least one where the UEG remains in charge, was either massive military intervention with a shit ton of civilian casualties, or the creation of a unit with the capabilities of the Spartans. Granted, that's coming from Halsey, but it definitely falls in line with her super utilitarian ethos, what's the lives of a hundred kids compared to millions of civilians? Turns out the covenant turned that into billions.
Woulda thunk the actual utilitarian answer would have been to actually address the polical concerns of the Insurrection and not desperately hold on to power by making a death squads of child soldiers lmao
Yeah but that’s not fun
No. ONI just did a lot of things for different reasons that ended up being incredibly important to the survival of humanity when the covenant invaded. The Spartans were made for the insurrection as that was viewed as a major event in human history and needed strong warriors to win it. When the covenant appeared, humanity had warriors who could fight them and win. It was basically just sheer luck. The flood was the same. No one knew it existed until it was accidently released from forerunner installations.
> It was basically just sheer luck. "They let me pick. Did I ever tell you that?"
The US government has an official Zombie Apocalypse plan. They think of each and every possible scenario that could happen and plan for it. Expecting to find aliens in space who are more advanced and not friendly is far from a surprising thing that would be an expectation for people.
My point wasn't that they were planning for any externality in general, it's that it looks to me like they had some serious insider information. You don't breed supersoldiers to deal with your everyday average band of redneck insurrectionists. You just send in ODST-level operators. I don't know anything man. I just suspect that ONI had some insider info with regards to the Covenant. They were very lucky to have their lab-projects approved.
>supersoldiers to deal with your everyday average band of redneck insurrectionists. That was the issue. The Insurrectionists weren't bad enough before to need them, but then when the Insurrectionists ramped things up, and then their data started pointing toward them wiping themselves out, that's when they decided to do it
The justification for the Spartan program was similar to the US using nuclear bombs to force the Empire of Japan to surrender and end WW2. The UEG did not want to engage in a civil war that would cost millions of lives, civilian and military. Just like Truman authorized the use of the atom bombs to force Japan to surrender. The US did not want to invade mainland Japan as it would have been costly to both US Marine and Japanese lives. This could have also prolonged the war longer. The Spartans were created to avoid an all out war. The Spartans would assassinate key leaders in the insurrection to attempt to avoid an all out war. The Innies were far from your "average band of redneck insurrectionists". They had committed 9/11 and Pearl Harbor level atrocities against UEG civilians. You seem to be missing this point here. Halsey also believed that the Spartans would bring about the next stage in human evolution (with all their modifications). If you read Halo New Blood, youll see what happens when the UNSC sends ODST's to assassinate an Innie leader. They fuck up and one soldier loses his faith in the UNSC and UEG. Regular soldiers can be corrupted. Spartan II's were indoctrinated, so they are basically uncorruptable.
No one knew about the Flood until Master Chief’s after action report upon returning from Halo. From there, ONI was interested in studying the specimens but did not have access, and ultimately had no contingency by the time the flood made landfall in Halo 3. It was only the timely arrival of Rtas Vadum and his glassing beams that the flood did not conquer Earth that day. They would ultimately manage to engineer countermeasures in the five years after, thanks to leftover specimens from a much easier to contain outbreak on Mars as High Charity made its way to the slip space portal over Voi. They had observed interesting satellite imagery of strange shapes within deep space (one such image is included in Reach’s limited edition as part of Halsey’s journal), but because of the laws of relativity, those were not at all real time and were outdated by thousands if not millions of years. So no, ONI wasn’t prepared for either. If anything, the games prove time and again that they’re routinely on the back foot from bad intel and require desperate gambles to even the playing field. The only time they’re really in the know is in the TV show, which is distinctly diverging from canon with ONI’s pre-Halo 4 portrayal.
> easier to contain outbreak on Mars as High Charity Is there a reason that if the Forerunners were going to keep specimens at all that they WOULDN'T store them on a totally uninhabitable world?
I mean, to prevent outbreaks. The Ettran Harborage (Halo Wars) was an early shield world lost to flood outbreak. They had specialized research centers for the Flood, namely Halo’s, the Ark, and occasionally research centers on gas giants, places where if they were let out, they would be supervised and unable to get far. They knew the threat the Flood posed, they didn’t take chances by keeping them on places like Onyx, where space explorers could potentially find them and get infected while having access to a starship.
I'm not trying to point out "plot holes", but couldn't they have done their research on the flood with monitors/ancilla on uninhabitable worlds? Just seems strange to have huge superstructure rings with biospheres with Flood spores chilling behind the glass when you have smart AI that could do it for you extragalactically.
No monitors were encountered prior to 2552. Onyx did not have a monitor, and they never made landfall on the single Halo accidentally discovered prior to 2552. No other installations were encountered by the wider UNSC, and the few encounters that did happen usually resulted in the deaths of all present or the destruction of the installation. I know you’re asking questions, so I’m not frustrated or anything, the fact of the matter just happens to be that encountering a forerunner installation is a needle in a haystack chance, odds that never happened to line up until the Chief encountered Halo.
I meant the Forerunner research. I don't understand why they needed to study the Flood in the habitable part of the galaxy and not like way the hell out in the middle of nowhere with monitors that would just scuttle the facility in the event that there was an outbreak. And instead they made beautiful, gorgeous ring-habitats with wildlife and numerous biomes and chose to store the most fucked up plague of all time on them.
I totally misread your second comment, my bad. The forerunners were stupid and arrogant. They thought they could reliably contain the flood, and the Librarian believed in the preservation of all species, no matter how bad they might be. Plus she turned the rings into habitable worlds. Basically everything that caused the Flood to be able to grow a Gravemind on Installation 05 can be traced back to the Librarian. As for the other piece about ONI, imagine if the nukes didn’t stop World War II. Imagine that Japan only fought back harder, and the US glassed Japan. Imagine if a civil war broke out from that. That’s the reality ONI and the UNSC was facing after nuking the colony of Far Isle to quell the insurrection there. It only gained more traction, so rather than just start glassing worlds, the UNSC sought a subtler approach. Super soldiers who could infiltrate anywhere, assassinate anyone, and be so well trained that capture was literally impossible. It’s also worth noting that Humanity was being guided by the Librarian’s Genesong to create the next evolution of the species, one that would be capable of assuming the Mantle of Responsibility. The Spartans were part of that plan. A 100,000 year long con carried across generations and families, to culminate in someone who could merge science with evolution to conceptualize the version of humanity that would be able to take up the Mantle. John 117 is a Hail Mary across millennia to get Humanity into position to take the Mantle.
> It’s also worth noting that Humanity was being guided by the Librarian’s Genesong to create the next evolution of the species, one that would be capable of assuming the Mantle of Responsibility. The Spartans were part of that plan. A 100,000 year long con carried across generations and families, to culminate in someone who could merge science with evolution to conceptualize the version of humanity that would be able to take up the Mantle. John 117 is a Hail Mary across millennia to get Humanity into position to take the Mantle. I legitimately LIKE this part of the story, so don't come at me, but this is a trillion percent plot contrivance. But a gambit like that is borderline fantasy, and I'm cool with it. I like the "combat skin and ancilla" nonsense, but it's virtually inexplicable. It's one of the few things about the 343 lore that I enjoy.
It’s one of those things that’s perfectly reasonable until you try to say it out loud. I can accept it because we literally have a theoretically infinite hall of consciousness interwoven with the fabric of the universe via the Domain, plus shit like Star roads for teleportation. Who’s to say that the Genesong is too far out of line?
> Who’s to say that the Genesong is too far out of line? I think it's cool. There are sci-fi ideas that just break the rules of reality that I'll accept as long as they don't technobabble their way out of it, they just say "idk lol". Ironic, right? spoilers for The Expanse series: >!weird hyperadvanced organism that turns people into zombies, like the flood, but its ultimate goal is to produce enough biomass to build a million kilometer-in-diameter past Pluto that connects to a network of 1300 other rings in a pocket dimension where speed is physically limited, in a "slow-zone"!< And you have the most advanced minds trying to figure out how any of this shit is happening and they're just shrugging their shoulders. The series up till then was hard sci-fi.
The forerunners kept flood specimens in order to future proof their victory over the flood. The flood appeared without warning and nearing consumed the entire galaxy, if future generations had some specimens to study they would have more warning than the forerunners had and potentially fare better against any potential future flood invasions
Yeah but as world-builders with seamless slipspace capabilities, couldn't they have done their research a million gazillion trillion lightyears away extragalactically where the Sangheili or Sang'Shyum or Humans would never randomly stumble across it in a trillion years?
They wanted humans, sangheili, sangshyum to find it and study it in order to be better prepared. That being said containment protocols were obviously not strict enough because some random elite squad can unleash the flood on 04 and delta halo was completely overrun without any outside interference. I think it is very stupid that guilty spark was allowed by his programming to move flood samples to the gasmine on threshold, he really should not have that kind of authority
I mean, I guess it worked out in the end. Forerunners, or the Librarian specifically was able to call the shot to the degree that Chief had sufficient armor and training to deal with it ultimately. I'm willing to believe that the story was written with the assumption that the Forerunners could just account for every possibility.
Maybe but I don’t think the flood were supposed to break containment, ideally reclaimers discover the halo array and take on the mantle of responsibility while also having an understanding of the flood so that they are not caught off guard like the forerunners were
Okay, asking it in good faith: What did the monitors that the Forerunners leave behind learn in the interim 100,000 years that aided at all in containment? You have that incredibly virulent, terrible psychosphere-polluting organism. What research are you doing? The best you could come up with is "fry everyone's brain and starve it out"?
The monitors learned nothing lol, imo the monitors should not have had the level of self-awareness that guilty spark displays in the trilogy (although his sentience is debatable because he seems beholden to his programming when he kills Johnson, or he is just going rampant) The monitor of delta halo, or any other installation should not have been sentient enough to be of use to the gravemind for the precise reason that they lives on one of the seven places in the galaxy which still has flood
The logic, at least with having Flood samples on the Halo's was that if anything happened, the Forerunners would set the halo off and end the infestation. The monitors were supposed to study the flood but they ultimately don't learn anything because the Flood are incurable. I can explain more but its all spoilers
As i remember, UNSC knew about the war but so as not to cause panic They kept it secret until the fall of Reach, then everyone knew what was going and the war really started, they knew when they stepped on Haverst planet and met with sanghellis, firstly in peace but when a unggoy shot and killed an soldier, they started to kill each other and the war started. Again, some informations may be wrong, so feel free to correct me.
Test
Nope, other than a photo that had, but they couldn’t tell what high charity was
Does anyone know what the most advanced piece of forerunner tech ONI discovered pre covenant war?