Universe

The universe is everything there is in regards to material existence.

Many scientists believe that the universe erupted into being from a singularity approximately 14 billion years ago, and has been expanding ever since. A recent calculation placed the visible universe at about 156 billion light years across creating a dilemma of faster than light speed movement, but it is speculated that the expansion of space itself can exceed the speed of light even if the objects within it moving on their own can not.. As an analogy, imagine ants (galaxies), sitting on an elastic rubber cord. that can't walk faster than 20cm/s. So normally two ants moving away from each other could not exceed a speed of 40cm/s relative towards each other (speed of light). However, if the cord itself is pulled while the ants are moving (expansion of space), the ants' speed can be greater.

For any location in space, it appears that that location is at the center of the expansion of the universe.

This concept can best be explained through the "balloon analogy": imagine you are a random spot on a spotted balloon, when someone inflates the balloon you'll see the spots moving away from you, so it would seem you are at the center of the expansion, furthermore the further away the spots are the faster they move away from you, this is also true for the universe: the more distant a galaxy is, the faster it moves away from us.

Currently scientists are only able to account for 4% of the matter in the universe, though new theories of dark matter recently emerged to account for this.

Young Earth Creationism View

Young earth creationists hold that the earth and universe are approximately 6,000 years old. Young earth creationist scientists state that there are multiple lines of evidence pointing to a young earth and universe; the old earth and universe paradigm has numerous anomalies and uses invalid dating methods, and there are multiple citations in the secular science literature that corroborate the implausibility of the old earth and universe paradigm (for details see: young earth creationism).

While there are differences in regard to the age of the universe, there is not necessarily a difference in viewpoint in regard to its size. For most Young earth creationists, the universe is as large as God wanted to make it. If that's calculated at 156 billion light years, then so be it.

The Forerunners

Little is known about the Forerunners, save that they were an extremely advanced civilization that inhabited the galaxy over 100,000 years ago, coming to power after the extinction of another race, known to them as the Precursors.

The Forerunner were highly technologically advanced, evidence of which has been found on various planets. The fact that The Halos were scattered around the galaxy also hints at the possibility that the Forerunner empire covered most, if not all, of the galaxy.

At some point in their history, a Forerunner survey team came into contact with an extra-galactic parasite known as the Flood on the planet G 617 g. After this first contact, the Forerunner realized the danger that the Flood posed to the entire galaxy and attempted to contain them.

The Forerunner were unable, however, to contain the Flood outbreak, and war between the two broke loose. During the 300 year conflict, the Forerunner studied the Flood in labs such as the one located on Threshold, looking for some sort of weakness. Eventually they created the Halo Array, a weapon of last resort designed to starve the Flood to death by killing all sentient life with enough biomass to sustain them.