urk said:
I don't think they would need to influence evolution directly. Merely institute cloning procedures from DNA records. Humanity is on the doorstep of such an event in today's age. It shouldn't seem so far fetched that the Forerunners would have a mastery of such techniques.
I agree that they wouldn't need to influence evolution directly, but I think if they had the ability to reseed a planet from nil, altering evolution would be but an afterthought. I don't know the parallels between Halo's fiction and the real world - or how Bungie gauges them. There are a lot of items and concepts in the Halo fiction which are outdated, despite it being five hundred years later.
I think if it serves the fiction well, regardless of certain plausibility, Bungie feels like it can be included. We could take this concept from the weapons and vehicles they use (some of which have been surpassed by our military circa 1995) all the way to whether or not the Forerunners could reseed an entire world. It's a balancing act between fun and believability.
One way to look at it would be: The Forerunners had ample opportunities to test their reseeding abilities on their artificial worlds - of which we can assume were plenty between the Halo Array and the Onyx Project. Perhaps they found that anything but a physical relocation was incapable of properly doing what need be done in a timely manner.
Still, if sentient and non-sentient life was being physically transported (an amazingly daunting task by any stretch of the technological imagination), then the environments found on the individual Halo components are left without explanation. We could assume they were used as habitat for Flood study, but then we know they were contained and isolated and none of the biomes we see show any sign of Flood infestation prior to the Covenants meddling. It's been left pristine.
I wouldn't abandon the notion of non-contained Flood study just yet - we don't know what liberties they took before the Array went live. After building the Array, it's obvious that huge risks were commonplace.
It is also likely that the Forerunners came from a variety of walks of life and planets, they may have even been more than one species. These different environments could be part of that same theme - being that some Forerunners lived their lives on the ringworlds. We know they thought the preservation of diversity was hallowed above all others - this could have easily extended to the non-sentient life of the installations and its geology/ecosystems.
And that also leaves the relevance of the Index in question. If it is merely a key for turning, then the Forerunners were monumentally stupid. If the importance stops at it being a physical object required to light the rings, then its only purpose is as a potential failing point of the array in the event of an emergency. Say, a rouge AI barreling toward the Ark, or something like that.
Mendicantly speaking, how probable is that? I mean really?
Yeah, it's a daunting thing to be certain. I think there's something to be said for the literal interpretation of the book of Genesis when it comes to the analogies we see in the Halo fiction. I think I read somewhere that Staten's father was a minister? I am not surprised in the least, if that is the case.
Also...we don't know how many sentient beings were on these planets. Humanity, it is said, has more people on its surface now than it did for the first four thousand years of our recorded history - combined. Remember, we're not talking about all organisms - just the sentient species.
It's clear, however, that Conservation Measure was a big job, and when I say big I mean motherfucking massive.
