xXCrocmonXx:Okay, people here seem to have the notion that Halo 4 (Activision is in charge of it, btw because they bought Bungie or something like that) will include Master Chief. However, this is not true. The man is dead. Take a hammer, put a post-it note with the previous sentence written on it, and beat your face in until you see skull fragments on the hammer. The Chief is gone, dead, never coming back EVER. I will explain the top five reasons as to why below:
1) Faster Than Light Communication - FTL Comms would be in the front of the ship since we know how the UNSC design their ships. That means the Chief's beacon would be like shooting an AM radio wave from Mars to Earth: three days to traverse that distance. From outside the galaxy to Earth? Centuries. Rescue's not coming in 'years, even.' Cortana will have unraveled her own coding and gone straight-up Mendicant Bias by that time and blown the ship up in a fit of AI-PMS. And to explain Rampancy: an AI in Rampancy is the equivalent of a clinically insane person. They don't realize they've gone totally mad, and they won't ever realize it. The only AI to have ever recovered from Rampancy in the Haloverse was Mendicant Bias, and that's probably just because he got bored of being insane.
2) Powered Cryo Tube - The reactor in the back-end of the ship is probably on low reserves, considering the fact that the Forward Unto Dawn was running during the entire course of Halo 3, shooting things, landing in atmosphere, and avoiding getting blown to all Hell, which means it's either out of fuel by the time it gets lopped in half or it's almost out of it. That means the pod he's sitting in only has at the most a few years of life in it. And when it powers off, he's screwed. Also, it slows down human processes - it doesn't stop them. For lack of use, his body will deteriorate in a state called atrophy. After a few decades of this, he will reach a point where he won't even be able to turn his head much less stand up in zero-gee. Also, his suit freezing to his skin will deteriorate his body on the molecular level slowly.
3) Starvation - He's in the middle of space. The closest planet is a Forerunner world that got blown the Hell up, and if the fly-over of it in Halo: Origins was canon, it's a barren planet that's devoid of anything except an atmosphere and metal. What's the Chief going to do? Evolve to eat steel, space-rock, and somehow drink the moisture in the air? Impossible. He's done. The hydroponics of the ship was at the front, either that or it's highly likely it will not work in a vacuum and on auxiliary power.
4) Traveling Outside The Galaxy - The portal was destroyed when the Halo on the Ark blew up. That's what sliced the ship in half. The Humans don't have the resources to hunt down the greatest supersoldier who would only return without a purpose and then grab an AI that significantly shortened its own lifespan and has probably gone insane. The Elites sure as Hell wouldn't look for him, they just barely respected him during the events of Halo 3. And besides, it isn't like they knew the limits of their ships in the first place: the ships looked fancy and could outclass UNSC ships, but the Covenant just reverse engineered and jury-rigged Forerunner tech into their ships. They couldn't make a jump to outside of the galaxy at random. Also, don't forget that the ship has some momentum to take it even further from the galaxy.
5) Reconstructing the 'Ark Portal' is Impossible - When the Halo fired, obviously some of it went through the portal. Otherwise, it wouldn't have closed. This probably obliterated one or both ends of the portal. This means that both openings of the portal (a portal/wormhole works like telephone, in layman's terms) would be disconnected from the center point they would connect at.If you stick your hand through a doorway (which is what that portal was) and the doorway closes with enough force to slice a spaceship in half, your hand will be on the other side of that doorway, and where the doorway sliced through will be representing all the distance the portal would have bypassed. Sure, stabilized wormholes work like telephones in a sense, but if a stabilized wormhole were to close when your hand would push through it, your hand would get lopped off and dropped at the exit point and you'd be standing in the entry point. The chunk between the severed hand and your arm would not be in a magical between world. And if it did collapse as he went through it, he wouldn't be anywhere in explored space - the Ark's solar system or otherwise. He'd be in a pocket of slipspace, completely separated from all means of communication. Thus, it reopening would not be possible before the Chief died out. Considering the front half of the Forward Unto Dawn fell into water in the cutscene, that means the Relic Site is probably filled back up with water by now, or otherwise destroyed with water on top. Or we could say the front half managed to get enough momentum to carry it to the oceans nearby, but still. The Relic site is almost definitely done for, and if it isn't, the Ark sure as Hell is. For a controlled wormhole to open, you'd need two points that could generate that spacial rift. If one end is gone, the wormhole will either open up somewhere random or not function at all. I doubt even an army of Huragok Engineers could fix that. And for the record, it wouldn't be the Chief that would be fixing it. That would be on the task of the people who would be on the other end of it.
So, to put it shortly: the Chief is dead due to the fact that FTL Comms are out of the question. He's also dead due to the fact that the Cryo Tube will run out of power before the beacon is received by any civilization in existence. And when the tube dies, what the Hell is he gonna eat? Space rock? Also, who would hunt down a supersoldier that has no purpose since there is no longer a threat? And the Ark exploded, for good. No portal opening ever. The Chief is dead, and you cannot bring him back, except in crappy stories written by thirteen year olds. Or, since Activision is in charge of the Microsoft Halo projects now, he isn't coming back unless Soap punches a hole in space-time with his bionic ice-picks and rescues the Chief with a vacuum-proof wetsuit because Activision needs another stupid-overpowered character to fuel a half-baked Tom Clancy rip-off of a story.
Generally i dont post here, occasionally reading threads, but your post really lacked a lot of thought and general lack of knowledge of halo in general. PS for all we know there can be a forerunner key ship on the surface of the mysterious apparently forerunner looking planet.