Rampant Speculation (Destiny)

by Malagate , Sea of Tranquility, Sunday, September 01, 2013, 18:17 (4101 days ago) @ Ragashingo

Yep. At the bare minimum the Sol system went from one habitable planet to several. And yeah, I would agree the that The Traveler has probably traveled extensively.

What if the Traveler is an artifact from a civilization we've seen nothing else of yet? My thought is that the Traveler is a sort of terraforming drone that came to our system, and converted bodies in our system to be habitable, whether they be moons or planets, paving the way for the arrival of colony ships or the equivalent from its master race.

Now, the race could still exist, or could be extinct, and the Traveler could be carrying out all this work in vain. That aside, what if the Traveler had certain protocols to follow in maintaining the habitability of the bodies under its care?

What if humanity figured we just lucked out and took advantage of these newly terraformed (for free!) bodies? WOO GOLDEN AGE.

At a certain point, the environmental impact of our civilization would begin to degrade the habitability factor of these terraformed bodies. We could have tripped the Traveler's protocols and unwittingly initiated our own demise. The Traveler could have wrought havoc across the system and tried to stamp us out itself, simply following its protocols to maintain habitable environments for whenever its masters arrive. Letting nature reclaim all the "progress" we made.

Perhaps using its superior technology, it swept across our our colonies before we could react and burned us all the way down to the quick. Perhaps Earth just crippled it badly enough in the ensuing battle that it came to rest in its present location and couldn't fight any longer.

Now think about all the other opportunistic races that could have done the same thing Humanity did. The Fallen claim to have touched every place in the span of human civilization (paraphrasing). Maybe they just knew that program and swooped in after we'd been nuked to scavenge all our loot.

My guess is that maybe somehow someone in the city has determined either A) this whole truth, or at the very least B) that the Traveler is somehow continuing to wane in power, and that the City is on borrowed time, and the Guardians must venture out into the wilds in an attempt to either find a way to maintain the Traveler's power, or find a way for humanity to reach beyond Earth and begin the long slog to reclaim our system.

~M