“Youth can last billions of years for a galaxy. Civilizations burn like grass fires on a dry prairie. Suns explode and kill. Nebulas spread new elements and seed new suns … and it all begins again. Our own galaxy has gone through many such cycles. We are just the latest.”
Time is a important factor in the Halo universe, particularly when the Forerunners or Precursors are involved. The timescales on which the Forerunners were known to operate are mostly unfathomable to mere humans. That isn’t to say we can’t logically understand it, doing the math to determine how many multiples of an average human lifespan individual Forerunners lived, but we can’t feel it in our bones. It is an idea that is so foreign to the human condition that all meaning quickly breaks down, and we are left with raw numbers that don’t truly express what living for ten-thousand years would mean. We can’t really understand what it is to have a civilization that lasted over ten-million years, when ours has lasted a meager ten-thousand, of which the first half is mostly lost to time.
This is the same problem people have when trying to comprehend the geologic timescales of the Earth, or the stellar timescales of our solar system and galaxy. These scales are just so impossibly long and have no comparison to human lives that the vastness of time is mostly lost to us. This is to ignore the physical vastness of the universe, which is impossibly incomprehensible in its own right.
To try and further your (and my) understanding of the timescales of Forerunners, I am going to do a deep dive into deep time, comparing the scales of human lives and human civilization to those of the Forerunners, and then comparing that to the geologic timescales of Earth. To further complicate this exploration, we will then look at what little we know of the Precursors, and how the timescales of their civilization compare to that of the Forerunners. I think we will find that while our lives are indistinguishable blips compared to the Forerunners’, theirs aren’t much more than blips when compared to the timescale of the Precursors or the universe.
Related Media
While minor, the following article makes reference to and could potentially contain spoilers for Cryptum, Primordium, and Silentium.
Timelines and Timescales
While the primary story of the Halo universe takes place around 500 years in the future, those events take place on the same timescales as do events today. The fate of the human race and the galaxy may not be at stake in real life (as far as we know), but the broad strokes of the mainline story cover a period of several years to a few decades, with singular events that unfold on the scales of minutes to hours to days. They may be more incredible and more fantastical, but they still operate on timescales that the human mind can easily comprehend.
The Individual
The Forerunners, meanwhile, operate on timescales that humans simply cannot feel. It is said that Forerunner armor made their lifespans virtually indefinite, but we know that their actual lifespans are at least several thousand years. Forerunner lifespans were managed by their armor, so while an average lifespan isn’t very easy to determine, living ten thousand years would be a reasonable low-end estimate for a Forerunner life.
Living for ten thousand years means your life would exist on an entirely different scale than that of a human. A person lives maybe 100 years if we are very lucky, and we mentally like to break down our short-term lives to days or weeks, our medium term to years, and our long-term to decades to help us conceptualize where we exist in our own personal timeline. A day to us would be the equivalent of over three months to a Forerunner, a week would be nearly two years, and the equivalent year to a Forerunner would last a century, or one human lifespan.
It’s hard to really take that in, but considering that an entire human life would last a single equivalent year to a Forerunner, it is no wonder that humanity would be looked down upon as a lesser species. A comparative species to humans would be a mouse, which lives around a single year. While we don’t judge animals solely on their lifespan, those short-lived animals definitely fall low down on our intellectual hierarchy of the animal kingdom.
To break this down further still, consider the very short scales of human life. We can easily waste an hour or four relaxing or just zoning out, taking a mental break. The Forerunner equivalent timescale would be on the order of a week or two, meaning binging every show on Netflix would be something they did between daily chores, lengthwise at least. The life of a being that lives for thousands of years would be inherently different than that of the average human.
Average Lifespan of Humans versus Forerunners
Of course these comparisons are just to contextualize the difference in timescales. The important takeaway from this is not that a Forerunner would be like a human, but stretched across the timeline hundreds of times longer, because it wouldn’t. What is important to realize is that a Forerunner would have fundamentally different concept of time. Most brief events would be nearly meaningless, and long-term plans wouldn’t look out five or ten years, but centuries or millennia. Imagine trying to plan out your life trajectory for the next thousand years. What happens over the course of a single year would have little consequence to the overall goal, and would thus be far less important to them than losing an entire year of your life would be to you.
The Civilization
The scale of the individual is not what fascinates me about the Forerunners though. The Forerunner civilization is understood to have existed for fifteen million years, a thousand times or more than since humans discovered agriculture. Ten million years prior to the firing of the Halo Array, or five million years into their civilization, they went to war with the Precursors. This war, as is told in Silentium, then goes on to disappear from Forerunner history by at least 100,000 BCE. How? How can such an impossibly large mobilization of the Forerunner military; one which effectively becomes a war between galaxies, become forgotten in its entirety? It can be hard to wrap your head around the idea of this war being completely forgotten by the entire Forerunner civilization, but consider the timescales involved.
What we consider the era of recorded history began with the invention of writing around 6,000 to 3,000 BCE, or 5-8 thousand years ago. History that was recorded with the intention of recording history, i.e. the first historians, only began around 500 BCE with the writings of Herodotus in Europe and Zuo Qiuming in Asia. Before historians, and certainly before the invention of writing, entire cities and civilizations rose and fell without any record of their existence to pass on to future generations. Only through relatively very recent archaeological findings have we discovered the existence of entire civilizations that had previously been lost to time.
The entire period we might consider to be recorded history, if we are being especially generous, only spans 10,000 years. Looking back further into prehistory, agriculture and clothing are thought to have been invented around one order of magnitude back in time, or around 100,000 years. The earliest records of man-made fire goes back even more, to about 1 million years ago. Double that and you get to around the time the first Homo Erectus are thought to have left Africa to settle Eurasia, or 2 million years ago. That it the entire span of what could be called human history, including a hominid species that isn’t even Homo Sapien.
If it were not for the fact that we live basically on top of where all this history happened on planet Earth and have dug it up over the centuries, we would really not have any clue about any of this beyond the last 10,000 years. As for what we do know about our ancestors from 2 million years ago, while we have decent fossil records, we have very little to no knowledge of the day-to-day lives of these ancestors outside of some educated guesses. We can’t zoom into their lives on the scales of years, decades, or even centuries. At best we know how the fossil record changed over the course of millennia or longer. The daily interactions between people, the trade between tribes, and the inevitable wars are completely lost to us.
Now apply this to the Forerunner civilization. Not only did the Forerunner-Precursor War occur 5 times further back into the past than Homo Erectus is to us, it happened in the vastness of deep space and in an entirely different galaxy. To say that the war, which also was purposefully buried in history due to the immense shame felt by those who perpetrated it, was lost to history in the 10 million years that elapsed between then and when we get our first glimpse of Forerunners around 100,000 BCE, is not a surprise at all. There are a lot of other reasons given for the loss of this history in the Forerunner Trilogy, but the immense passage of time is more than enough to explain why no Forerunner in 100,000 BCE is remotely aware that this war ever happened at all.
Timescales of Forerunners
As it turns out, however, we aren’t even done with Forerunner history. There is still another 5 million years of history before the Forerunner-Precursor War. We know nearly nothing about the Forerunners from this time, but if we assume their technological and societal growth followed a similar pattern as humans have, they would have been about 3 million years more advanced than we are today. Even compared to the Halo universe timeline, they still would have been 3 million years more advanced than humans are in the 26th century. All that technological growth we have seen in the past 2 centuries and all that growth presumed to happen between now and the 26th century with faster-than-light travel, extrasolar colonies, and nuclear-powered supersoldiers would be a meaningless blip compared to those 5 million years of development that happened before the Forerunner-Precursor War and the 10 million years that happened after. To say the Forerunners operated on scales unimaginable to humans is the understatement of 100,000 human lifetimes.
The Universe
Now the you have hopefully been adequately humbled by the timescales of both the forerunners and their civilization, how does their civilization stand against the timescales of the universe? It is said the Precursors existed for longer than the universe has existed. Taking that at face value, we can say that the Precursor species has existed in this universe since time began during the Big Bang, or 13.7 billion years. From that fact alone we know that the Precursor civilization, whatever that may have looked like, existed for around 1,000 times longer than that of the Forerunners. Even looking at the graphic above, where the entire time between the Halos firing and today is dwarfed by the length of the Forerunner civilization, the difference between the two is only around 150x. This kind of data is usually better comprehended graphically, so lets compare the length of the Precursors to that of the Forerunners and to humanity.
Approximate Length of Species Existence
Ok, so by this point it shouldn’t be surprising that humanity is looked down upon by most Forerunners, and likewise Forerunners and humans are likely looked down upon in some respects by the Precursors. But it isn’t the comparison between species that really interests me. It’s clear going in that the Precursors civilization would dwarf that of the Forerunners in scale just based on the little information we know about them. It’s the comparison of human timescales to Forerunner timescales to deep geologic time that fascinates me. While the Forerunner civilization makes human civilization seem petty and ephemeral in both space and time, compared to geologic time its still a tiny meaningless existence. Humans in some form may have existed for 2 million years or so, and Forerunners lasted nearly 8 times that length, but even so they weren’t around long enough to have seen significant changes in geologic and climactic cycles like we know have happened on Earth.
For example, the fossil record on Earth is divided into different Eras and Periods. Some of these are well known by the general public such as the Triassic, Jurassic, and Cretaceous, which are all Periods within the Mesozoic Era, lasting from 251 million years ago (mya) to 66 mya. The end of that Era, and the start of the Cenozoic which we are in now, is defined by the asteroid impact that is thought to have wiped out the dinosaurs and much of life at the time. While we tend to consider that event to have happened on ancient Earth, in reality it is a fairly recent event when compared to the rest of the fossil and geologic record.
The Cenozoic, which the Earth has been in for the past 66 million years, is then broken down into its own Periods. The first, the Paleogene, lasted from around 66 to 23 mya. This saw birds evolve and mammals start to spread and become the dominant animal group on the planet. It wasn’t until the next Period, the Neogene, that saw oxygen levels stabilize out to around what we see today at 21%. That was only 23 mya. The Forerunner species only existed for 15 million years, so compared to the vast spans of time experienced by the planet, it really is just a drop in the ocean.
Prior to that, Earth saw even more incredible change and growth in the fossil record. Dinosaurs are generally considered to have been around for the entire Mesozoic, but they rally didn’t dominate the fossil record until the Jurassic. Even so, they were one of the dominant groups of animals on Earth for over 100 million years. on top of that, during the evolution and spread of dinosaurs, fauna and flora we consider basic came into existence. Flowering plants are first seen in the fossil record around 130 mya, well into the existence of dinosaurs. Snakes were first seen around 170 mya. Even the first true forests only came into existence around 380 mya.
These may sound like extreme timescales, but the fossil record dates back at least 3.5 billion years. The geologic record extends further to about 4.5 billion years ago. And even considering this immense amount of time, we don’t have to look back relatively far to see the difference in the time scale of the Earth and its life to that of the entire Forerunner civilization. Pangea, the single landmass many consider to be synonymous with dinosaurs, formed around 335 mya, and broke apart around 175 mya. At the time of Pangea, the Earth’s surface would have looked alien from space to anyone today. But between 175 mya and today, the continents drifted from a single landmass to the seven continents we are familiar with now. Considering the entire Forerunner species only came into existence 15 mya, the Earth’s surface would have looked very similar then to how it looks now. All 7 continents would have been formed and relatively close to their current location on the surface. The Indian subcontinent would have already impacted the Eurasian plate and created the Himalayas, considered one of the most recent geologic landmasses.
What is so hard to wrap my mind around is that while this continental drift from Pangea to the Earth’s surface today occurred over the past 200 million years, it’s only the latest time the continental plates combined and drifted apart. This process is thought to have happened three or possibly four other times previously, combining and breaking apart landmasses through the Eras. That is nearly an endless changing of the surface of the Earth over its entire existence over the last 4.5 billion years. Then there is all the history before the Earth and the Sun going back to early stars and the formation of the Milky Way galaxy and back further in time, all the way to the Big Bang itself, 13.7 billion years ago.
The timescale of the universe is just unfathomably immense, one which completely dwarfs not just our time on Earth as humans, but even the 15 million year old Forerunner empire, which is impossibly grander than anything humanity has ever done in the Halo lore or in real life. From our vantage point, the Forerunner empire is mind-bogglingly large, having existed for millions of years beyond the entirety of our species, spread across the entire Milky Way galaxy. They could build entire worlds, entire stars, and travel through the entire galaxy in mere days. Yet even that is hardly an accomplishment when compared to the vastness of the universe, both in time and in space.
Scales of Time and of Space
This article is mostly focused on the timescales of the human and forerunner civilizations, but I want to be sure to touch on the differences in empire size as well. Humans today live on one world, Earth. In the Halo universe, their empire extended to over 800 colony worlds at its greatest point, spread amongst likely a few hundred star systems. The Forerunner Empire, meanwhile, spread over basically the entire Milky Way galaxy, though even that “only” covered about three million worlds. I say “only” because three million is a few orders of magnitude larger than 800, but compared to just the Milky Way galaxy as a whole, it is still a drop in the bucket. The Milky Way galaxy is thought to be home to between 100 and 300 billion star systems. Assuming those three million Forerunner worlds were spread over three million star systems, that would still only account for around 0.001% of all the star systems in the Milky Way.
Colonized Star Systems of the Human and Forerunner Empires
Colonized Star Systems of Humanity and Forerunners Versus Estimated Milky Way Size
It has been said that the universe has more stars than the Earth has grains of sand. When you look beyond just the Milky Way, we find hundreds of billions of other galaxies, each with hundreds of billions of stars. Estimates for the total number of stars in the observable universe vary, but a decent guesstimate based on the data we have is around 1 septillion, or 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 stars. Compared to the measly 3,000,000 stars the Forerunners may have colonized, that’s only 0.0000000000000003% of all the stars in the observable universe. Granted, many star systems are likely unsuitable for colonization of any kind, but even if a very small percentage of them were, it would mean the Forerunners still had a very very long way to go to being a significant factor on a universal scale. Humanity may be newborns in the universe, but considering the true scale of the universe, Forerunners are still in diapers too.
Summary
For anyone who has previously explored the Halo lore and been in awe at the scale of the Forerunners with their shield worlds, Halos, and galaxy-spanning civilization, it probably comes as no surprise to you at just how unfathomably more advanced the Forerunners are than humanity, either compared to current day or to the Halo timeline. Likewise, for anyone who is interested in the deep history of Earth or the universe, the smallness of humanity is probably something that has crossed your mind at least as some point. What is fascinating is just how large the universe really is in both space and time, to the point where even the Forerunners are dwarfed to a scale much closer to that of humanity than to the full breadth of space and time. The Forerunners were imagined to be the impossibly large ancient alien race, so much further advanced than humanity that their technology appears to be magic. However it is clear that even they had an impossibly long way to go to become the true masters of their domain. Their interaction with the Precursors was extremely limited, but their star roads and neural physics would have been nearly as magical to them as the Halos and shield worlds are to humanity.
This article didn’t set out to answer a specific question, but rather explore the depths of time and space. I have always been fascinated with huge scales because they are something that are not easily comprehended by the human brain. We generally lose grasp of the true scale when something is very large or very small, and developing analogs to describe the situation differently can help to better wrap our heads around. Something I didn’t mention above, was that while there are probably more stars in the universe than grains of sand on Earth, there are about the same number of atoms in a grain of sand than stars in the universe. So the scales definitely go both ways, and both are equally hard to completely understand for the human brain.
The great ancient philosopher Qui-gon Jinn was once heard to have said the following regarding an interaction with alien fauna that I think applies well not only to creatures of the deep, but also to the Halo universe and its many advanced alien empires:
There’s always a bigger fish.
Truer words may never have been spoken.
