From the Forerunner Crystal adventure in First Strike, to the famous “I Love Bees”, we’ve seen time travelling in Halo, and fan theories of time travel pop up here 'n there. However, each time it has popped up in the story, the “canon-ness” has been debated, and the overall state of retroactive changes left those stories feeling shaky. For the Forerunner Crystal, there’s the fact that multiple revisions have occurred for those first few books, for ILB it’s that its canon state has outright changed multiple times.
As of right now, Franky/343i seem to be leaning on having ILB as canon, but this does bring up a few odd concerns, primarily for the prehistoric era of Halo’s universe. Chiefly among them, the conflicts between The Forerunners and The Precursors/Flood. The time travelling in ILB was the result of an accident, but even then I find it hard to believe that neither the Forerunners nor the Precursors would have learnt how to replicate this effect (and stably at that,) in order to rid themselves of nearly any conflict altogether. Though, it’s entirely possible that the Haloverse relies on split threads of time instead of a singular thread (so time travelling would likely solve nothing for them?). Yet even then I find it odd that we’ve never heard of any exploits of that sort of technology from either race given its potential.
I’m really rambling here, but it’s only because it’s such an interesting topic in the context of the Haloverse. There’s quite a few consequences that roll in nearly any direction if it’s canon, or if it’s not. So what’s your opinion on this as of right now? Do you see any other problems or solutions? Are there other plot concerns that I didn’t raise here? I’d really love to see what other people have to say on this topic, because it really doesn’t seem to be discussed often enough.
Forerunners and Precursors are smart enough that a single mistake could make it so that their species would become extinct or something even worst would happen, we also do not know how TT would work in Halo, whether it is paradox-type time travel or if it is pre-determined time travel.
> 2533274829152751;2:
> Forerunners and Precursors are smart enough that a single mistake could make it so that their species would become extinct
Couldn’t it also be argued (at least in the Precursor’s case,) that their knowledge for the universe was intimate enough to know how to use it without dire consequences? You’d think if Neural Physics came so easily for them, that this wouldn’t be but so difficult either. Two entirely different beasts to be sure, but for a race as advanced as they were, I can’t say that I’d expect them to have not mastered it, provided that they could actually use it at all. Neural Physics slip space travel had Flood ships travelling through the multiverse, so surely time travelling wouldn’t be but so far out of their scope, yeah?
I just hope time travel will never play a role in Halo Canon, every time TT gets involved in a story things start to get extremely confusing and Halo got along for a long time without time traveling (sure it was there but not as major part of the story) so why include something that yoinks up story’s at the moment it plays a major role?
I remeber reading somewhere, maybe TFoR, that Humanities use of slipspace can be a bit iffy, with reports of ships even arriving at destinations before they had even set off.
The Reach crystal affecting the time line in First Strike is fine with me because they don’t really know what their doing with it and it didn’t affect the universe as a whole.
But the moment 343 decide to create a giant time traveling device that can fix all the Galaxy’s issues, I’m out.