I know the flood is a parasite, which live of their host, but I’ve wondered for a while that, throughout every Halo game we have played on, each world/halo has oxygen on it. From Alpha ring to the shield world of 0459 in Halo Wars, which would seem a pretty hostile place, however marines are capable on surviving on the planet. Can the flood manipulate the host, negating the use of oxygen? This would be a good opportunity to play a video of a flood spore in a vacuum like from a video off youtube, but no such thing exists sadly.
One would think if that were the case then the Forerunners would’ve just vented their ships of atmosphere in the events of boarding by the Flood.
Based on what we see in “The Origins” I would say no,as we see Flood in space.
However,“The Origins” is not 100% accurate.
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> One would think if that were the case then the Forerunners would’ve just vented their ships of atmosphere in the events of boarding by the Flood.
Or in the case of HW1’s shield world, just turned off the artificial enviroment.
It’s been made pretty clear the flood don’t have need of the host’s vital organs, so it makes sense they dont need air.
I assumed they essentially don’t need anything because of how highly adaptive they are – the way they can very rapidly completely reconfigure their biological make-up. They presumably have ways of deriving the energy they need without the constant intake of air – this may well be at the cost of the biomass itself (gotta get fuel somewhere), but as long as they keep conquering, shouldn’t be an issue. And it’s been proven that they can enter complete hibernation that suspends them seemingly indefinitely.
As for how they endure the vacuum of space without their vital bits freezing and trying to spread out, well… I dunno. Maybe the stuff that hangs out on the outside of ships has hardened, non-liquid innards. Or wherever there are liquids, any orifices are securely valved multiple places along the path to the outside, to control the pressure. I dunno. Space zombies.
I don’t think they themselves do since they feed off intelligent. but I think the bodies they use most certainly do. That is the purpose of the halo rings. get rid of the food source, get rid of the flood.
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> Based on what we see in “The Origins” I would say no,as we see Flood in space.
> However,“The Origins” is not 100% accurate.
We do see flood biomass on the outside of ships in Halo 3 though. The infested CCS cruiser and High Charity both operated in the void until they crashed, presumably with the biomass still attached.
It’s a good question. Based on what we’ve seen in the lore, Flood can exist in the vacuum of space. But that also begs the question about Flood physiology and how it metabolizes. For carbon-based life, oxygen is an essential element, and though the Flood are described as “the dead reanimated”, a Flood supercell is definitely a living cell. Without evidence to the contrary, I would have to assume that it functions similarly to known biology (breaking down large molecules into building blocks for proteins, lipids, nucleic acids, and other things; ATP synthesis for molecular energy, which requires oxygen; DNA replication and mitosis; etc).