A lot of people think that time travel to the past, is a thing in Halo, but nothing prove it. It’s not because Master Chief and the Weapon made an accidental jump of three day in the future than we can talk about time travel.
Travel to the past and change the reality is something completely different and infinitely more complicated, nothing in Halo show us it’s possible.
Manipulating time could mean a lot of thing. With the relativity, time does not pass at the same speed for everyone. For example, if 1 hour somewhere = 1 year in the universe, we can talk about a travel to the future, but not to the past.
Another example, in the forerunner trilogy, the Urdidact accelerate the time around the Primordial to kill him.
Another science fiction concept could be to travel to the past but you can’t change anything, it’s only for observation.
Maybe the Endless survive to the Halo by jumping in the future and avoid the destructive wave, but I don’t think they have the capacity to travel to the past.
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Those micro rings gotta be good for something
The time travel came from them being teleported through data clusters
Its still very vague and realise we only got to play 1/3 of the actual full campaign
Time manipulation has occured in Halo lore before Halo: Infinite, but most certainly not at the extent people are hoping for this time around.
I feel like it would be a pointless avenue to go down, though. What would change? The Covenant still outclass humanity in every aspect. Unless some think the Chief will jump back in time, TimeSplitter’s 2 style, and kill the Prophet’s before they launch their campaign, in which case it would just be boring and predictable.
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In the legendary ending when the monitor states ‘time is not a construct they control’ I thought they meant time as a concept. Like they don’t know what might happen in the future that would free them. Not that it was some device. Also if those cylixs that we see in the installation are full then isn’t that an army waiting to be freed.
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Time travel is so full of incoherence in a lot of movie, I really hope Halo won’t have it !
I do all the bad decisions to make Halo woke and free to play is hurting it and will kill it in the end. No amount of lying it not won’t stop that.
Came here from the other topic per your link.
Dr. Halsey loaded mission reports from Admiral Whitcomb’s, John’s, and Fred’s teams. She frowned at the official UNSC incident forms as their highlighted time, date, and location stamps scrolled across her screens.
“Are you done with the temporal analysis of these logs?”
“Yes, Doctor. You were correct: There is a discrepancy between the Halo team and the team on Reach. The time stamps are off by an average of three weeks. I hypothesize that this was caused by my gravity-influenced Slipspace transition.”
The corners of Dr. Halsey’s mouth flickered into a smile. “I’m disappointed, Cortana. That’s a guess … and an incorrect one at that.”
“Really?” Cortana replied with a hint of challenge in her tone.
“Do you have any data from your subsequent gravity-influenced translation to correlate?”
There was a two-second pause, and then Cortana finally answered, “Yes, Doctor. There are no temporal displacements on those later jumps.”
“As I suspected.” Dr. Halsey tapped her finger on her lower lip as she thought. “Plot the temporal irregularities on a space-time surface. Then call up my file on the spatial distortion generated by the alien artifact.”
On the displays appeared two sets of nearly identical curved membranes that stretched about a central location and time: Reach and the recovery of the strange artifact.
“That thing not only bends space,” Dr. Halsey whispered to herself, “but bends time as well.”
“That’s not possible,” Cortana said. “How could the artifact on Reach affect us on Halo—light-years away?”
“Don’t think of it as physical distance,” Dr. Halsey replied absentmindedly, staring at the monitors. “You and John were on an event path intersecting the crystal.” She moved the curves over one another; the time and space surfaces were a perfect match. “You had to be there at that place and time to recover us and remove the crystal—time and space warped to make that event occur.”
First Strike pgs 247-248
https://www.halopedia.org/2552#September’s_anomaly
Isn’t there a whole fictional religion that would confirm this “space bending around fixed events” to make sure they happen? I’ll just refer to it as “Do you know da wai”, but there was a whole article on Halopedia about it that I now cannot find…
This “Menachite Forerunner crystal” is able to to manipulate the relativity of time in a complex way :
The crystal acted on future events, John and Cortana’s journey to Reach, and made them arrive in the present.
So far, there is no way to go from the present to the past, and even less to change the reality of the present. The future has not happened and is in perpetual motion, while the past is already happening and changing it would change the present
Looking at the dates, it does seem as though they did, in fact, go backwards in time.
September 19th is when the Battle of Installation 04 begins, in the “anomaly” timeline. It’s rectified by (Anomaly) September 23rd, when John-117 re-enters the correct timeline.
Following that rectification, on September 7th (two weeks prior), we have the events of First Strike, with John-117 post-Installation 04 on the Ascendant Justice.
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Fixing dates due to time moving at different speeds isn’t quite ‘going back in time’ though.
If location A is moving faster than B, but then A meets B, and B is at an earlier time, A didn’t necessarily “Go back in time”. It merely experienced ‘more itme’ than B did.
A better way to put it:
A meeting up with B does not allow A to change events in A’s past. It doesn’t have the ability to change any events A has witnessed. B also wasn’t ‘changed’ it just kep doing what it was doing.
Effectively party A experienced 10 days, party B experienced 5 (not actual numbers). Them meeting up on B’s day 5 doesn’t mean A time traveled into B’s past or its own past. It just synced up with whats happening in B.
Effectively its time dilation.
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I more or less get what you’re saying, but there is still the known dates that John-117 and Cortana did go backwards in time from Sep 23 to Sep 7. John-117 experienced 16 days ahead of and outside of “normal time”, and was “rubber-banded” back after Sep 23. It’s like he started the race before anyone else with a giant bungie-cord (heh) around his waist, then when he got far enough it yanked him back to the beginning so that everyone could go.
An imperfect analogy; analogies aren’t going to help a whole lot here.
It’s not time travel in the sense that we typically see it. He’s not going to see another version of himself, a younger version, or have to follow silly rules about not messing with the past or he’s going to disappear. There’s no way back to his accelerated chronological trip, as the Forerunner crystal moved them backwards to rejoin the normal flow of time. But it still remains that he did travel backwards in time, albeit a very circumstantial instance that likely will not be replicated.
At least, not until we know more about the Xalanyn.
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Either way I think this is a good example of why its a good idea to keep time travel (of any variety) out of the main games.
We just spent a decade with people not understanding the games cause they hadn’t read a book, lets not introduce them to temporal mechanics.
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Yup.
Time manipulation is by no means a new thing in Halo. It’s been a thing since pretty much the beginning.
But it’s not “time travel”.
Time can move at different speeds in and out of slipspace, much like in the real world time works differently if you were to space travel.
Time never moves backwards though.
Time travel is a franchise killer. If they were to actually ad time travel to Halo. I would be done with the franchise permanently.
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A simplified summary of “Halo First Strike” dates:
- 22 September: John’s departs to reach
- September 7: Halsey discovers the crystal and John joins them
- September 13: John departs for Earth
- October 20: Early Halo 2
It is not known when John and Cortana arrived on Earth after the events of “Halo first strike”. Maybe time was slowing down around the crystal, which Halsey thought was September 7 but the real date in the rest of the galaxy was September 22. After the destruction of the crystal, time could have continued to flow normally. When she returned to Earth, she would have realized that it was she who did not have the exact date
Since we are missing dates and this paradox was never addressed afterwards, it is difficult to know what happened. What did you think of this theory?
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The dates in the early books will always confuse me. But this theory could be believable enough to clear things up a little.
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