It's unsettling to consider that much of the technology employed by the Combine is rooted in human origins. Razor Trains draw inspiration from conventional trains, APCs resemble cars, and AR2s bear resemblance to guns. What if all of these technological advancements were exclusively designed for Earth and had limited usage beyond our planet? Perhaps each conquered world merely adapts modified versions of this technology to assert control over their inhabitants, lending significance to the name "Combine."
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Yeah, I think so too, they largely turn worlds against themselves to spend as little resources as possible. The literal core of their operations is the technology that allows them to tap into dark energy, they mysterious constant that keeps the universe expanding, they turn it into plasma and use it as munitions, they use it to power their versions of our machinery, but other than that, it's all Earth. Maybe even the darkened steel they use is terrestrial in origin.
I really like this idea because this omnipresent force throughout the games is just us with a shade of omnipotent power.
Makes you wonder what things would be like after the Combine is well and truly gone, humanity would have access to their knowledge of how to use dark energy for power, as well as knowledge of the advanced robotics and metal refining the Combine uses, this combined with humanity's teleportation technology would open the literal door for interstellar exploration, it would also solve humanity's dependency on fossil fuels, and give us many new opportunities.
I always thought the idea of the humans becoming the advisors or the race of the G-Man or even the Combine itself as plausible but with several holes. Still a neat idea
We would also have access to their techno-organic technologies. Although I wonder how much use we would have of it if we re-implement an ethics committee in our new society.
Something that would be an immediate problem for post-Half-life 2 society is the transhumans of Overwatch. The ones that don't fight back (no orders; unconscious) would be a living, breathing, walking problem, because here you'd have lobotomized human beings who are presumably dependant on Combine technology to live, needing to interface with it for sustenance and waste disposal, and they can't just be abandoned to starve to death, because they are victims of the Combine as well, nobody chose to become these things. It would be necessary to have a whole organization to tackle the condition that was imposed on them, and to try to rescue their identities from the recesses of their machine brains (if that is even possible). I figure the knowledge on synth tech would see a lot of use in the aftermath of Half-life.
Yeah. Synth tech is important I guess, but for totally different moral reasons. I wonder if we would still use the techno-organic machinery left behind? which is using organic matter to power Combine terminals, screens, Etc. We can see in Half-Life Alyx that there are animals forcefully being kept alive so they can power Machinery. Personally, I wouldn't be surprised if the Combined used humans in some bigger tech. As an example, the mini reactor that Eli stole at the beginning of HLA.
Here's a timestamp clip of what I mean, If you didn't already get my drift. youtu.be/q1FxVqRQP3M?t=68
Yeah. I think they would by necessity of having to interact with Combine stuff, but it wouldn't be a practice humanity would adopt, especially since we don't have access to these creatures haha.
I wouldn't say that rats and guts are unobtainable resources, but okay. I agree that we will probably still use them to a limited degree.
It's also worth considering that Aperture Science had access to energy pellets before any Combine occupancy of Earth, implying that they probably took that from Earth technology too.