If wiping out all life to prevent all life from being wiped out doesn't make sense to you, then you must be somehow defective.

Just for the record, when the flood come flying through the portal and crash in to earth in Halo 3, that was one of my favorite part of the game!!1 It was awesome.

man that was great ^^

watching a marine scream, i only made it in time to see a little floodling going through his skin, then making his skin mutate with bubbles etc (cant describe it) and watch him turn into a flood then begin to charge at me

Non Sequor said: If wiping out all life to prevent all life from being wiped out doesn't make sense to you, then you must be somehow defective.

 It makes sense if there's no other option but I'm not convinced there was no other option. 

Non Sequor said: If wiping out all life to prevent all life from being wiped out doesn't make sense to you, then you must be somehow defective.

 Well said Non.

 

What I don't get is why they even built the Halo's. In the game we're told that they built the Halo's to study the Flood, that they had the power to place the flood on the halos, and that they were built to blow up themselves and everything around it to stop the Flood from spreading... 

Wouldn't it have been easier to just kill the flood? I mean if they're on the Halo's, just destroy the Halo's. The whole Giant lab that can wipe out the galaxy thing never really made much sense to me.

 

the flood, can reproduce from just a single cell, although between the games, and books there is some discrepincy. the forerunners were also studing the flood. it is also known that the forerunners created many life forms, so is it possible they are trying to correct a wrong they unleashed upon the galaxies.

for infecting hosts, they have to have calcium in there body in sufficiant mas. so no hunters are taken over by flood, and if you have an excess amount of plasma in your blood they cant infect you (as seen in sgt johnson). so it is possible for centient life to exsist, with the flood.

the gate that is on earth in halo 3 seems to be the get up and leave aproach, unfortunatly as seen in halo 3 the flood can fallow. now there is the problem in the current galaxy that a the flood was only destroyed on the far side of the gate, the flood is still on the other side, seems fire works well, and as long as no grave mind is formed they can not effectivly organise to leave a planet.

as seen in the books, and halo 3 glassing, or heating the affected area to high enough temp to turn earth to glass.

also anyonee else notice how the grave mind tries to playitself of as a utopian dream?

twesterm said: kn said: And last, but not least, when was the last time you saw anyone walk away from their property because of some intruder? Would you abandon your home to cockroaches or would you spend great time and effort to kill them? If the cockroach problem presented me with the options of die or GTFO then yes, I would gladly just abandon my property. I don't know, just the way they make the Flood seem it just seems like it could live real long without life to feed on. If it could live a long time, then it could just migrate to a galaxy that didn't get touched by the Halo's (like Earth) and continue to spread. I assume since they can follow they can go as fast as the things their following and since they can travel between places pretty quickly in the game the flood can move that quickly then.

 Well, the cockroach problem is not a "die or GTFO" optio.  It presents a real threat, but the threat is percieved to be "eliminatable" so the option to eliminate (or attempt to) is made instead of abandoning.

There are few such paradoxs in real life and the story certainly reflects this.  Rarely is there a scenario where life-changing events are set in stone and the exact outcome in the future is known definitively based solely on you choosing event A or event B exclusively. 

This might help...

In the Halo book "Ghosts of Onyx" they discover a "safty world" that was built by the fore runners (as is also implied by the "Arc" in Halo 3)

Based on this and the data terminals found in Halo 3, here's my current understanding:

The forerunners initially tried to fight the flood more conventionally and counld find no means of defeating it.

They then built the Halo project that would destroy all life in the galaxy but...

They also built one (or more) safe havens (Arks) that they could hide in and survivie the cleansing of the Halo rings.

BTW, I think a better metaphore than insects is cancer. If you think of the universe as a living being (full of life) the Fore runners saw the flood as a cancer.

Even if they left the galaxy, the flood would consume all other life in the galaxy and eventually expand wherever they went. And once cancer spreads too far you can't stop it.

So the plan was to take out the cancer in this small area (small being relative, in this case one galaxy).