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The Flood has to have DNA. People have compared the Flood to bacteria, virus, and fungi. All three happen to have DNA, because DNA is required for life. I like to believe that this is just the Forerunners showing us a part of the Flood DNA sequence. I don't know enough about molecular genetics to say that this IS said Chinese Alligator, but I do know that most DNA is similar, because lots of codes that say 'this thing has an arm here' is the same between species.

I guess what I'm saying is that I agree with you in that this is a storytelling bit, but it's more from the angle that this is a portion of the Flood's DNA, saved by the Forerunners.

It's ~99.81 Chinese Alligator, that's more than Ivory soap pure.

Anyway, I doubt they'd expect more than what we've got. Unless there's something about Chinese alligators, or we find a gator somewhere with an IP tattooed on it, this seems like the last stop on this train.

But yeah, the entire DNA thing is a bit off. There was a nice bit in ArsTechnica about a NASA panel discsussing our "human bias" in the search for life, which I think the Castaway Theory alluded to.

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20 ... ities.html

DavFlamerock wrote:The Flood has to have DNA. People have compared the Flood to bacteria, virus, and fungi. All three happen to have DNA, because DNA is required for life.

For the record, viruses don't meet all 7 characteristics of life and, therefore, aren't alive. I wish we had a definitive description of the Flood. Either it's a bacteria or a virus. When doing PDI, this ambiguity made things hard because I couldn't say that Slide_Ref070507 was a picture of a Flood cell, because I honestly wasn't sure if Flood had cells.

The flood aren't necessarily a virus, they could be a parasite.

in halo first strike dr. halsey called the flood a meta organism- idk if that helps

Just like how scientists tag certain organisms with DNA tags that produce noticable proteins I think that the Forerunners tagged the Chinese Alligator along with other noteworthy organisms with these certain DNA codes to differentiate them from other non special organisms.

Ibeechu wrote:

DavFlamerock wrote:The Flood has to have DNA. People have compared the Flood to bacteria, virus, and fungi. All three happen to have DNA, because DNA is required for life.

For the record, viruses don't meet all 7 characteristics of life and, therefore, aren't alive. I wish we had a definitive description of the Flood. Either it's a bacteria or a virus. When doing PDI, this ambiguity made things hard because I couldn't say that Slide_Ref070507 was a picture of a Flood cell, because I honestly wasn't sure if Flood had cells.

Whether they meet the requirements for life or not is beside the point as far as reproduction is concerned. They reproduce, and the only means of doing that is with DNA. [And for the record, DNA is required for life in as much that, as far as we know, all life has DNA. A logical fallacy, perhaps, but it's true.]

As for whether or not the Flood have cells, they do, but not in the strictest sense of the word. If they are a fungi or bacteria, then they should have normal cells as far as we understand them. If they are a virus, they still have an outer lipid membrane, and so, will look similar to many cells, albeit lacking in any organelles.

For comparison:

Slide_Ref070507


Electron micrograph of icosahedral virions

Whoa, the flood virus is like HIV in structure!

i recall reading in either one of the halo novels or something that the flood was silicon (no e on the end, my mistake the first time) based, not carbon, if that helps at all...course, i could be wrong and just imagined that, but w/e

bumontheroad wrote:i recall reading in either one of the halo novels or something that the flood was silicone based, not carbon, if that helps at all...course, i could be wrong and just imagined that, but w/e

Boo. Boo, if they are. Silicon (not silicone, that's the stuff that goes into breast implants) is way more abundant than carbon on earth, but we don't have silicon-based lifeforms here. Silicon's chemistry simply isn't as versatile as carbon's. It would never happen.

As to life necessarily being based on DNA, this is bogus. Life on Earth developed to use DNA, but this doesn't mean that life that developed somewhere else also relies on DNA. DNA is a very particular molecule with lots of idiosyncrasies of chemical structure. There's nothing fundamental about it - there are other ways of encoding information in polymers. The particular nucleotide bases used, for example, are almost completely arbitrary. The Flood, being extragalactic in origin, would almost certainly not use DNA.