I haven't watched the ep. yet. But the time delay could be changed by velocity? Or maybe the rocket was flying factors faster than the helicopter.

[Edited on February 29, 2008 at 9:48 AM. Reason : 14!]

2/29/2008 9:48:09 AM

soo...
like for every minute of flight time you add a couple mins, not just tack on a couple mins to the total?

[Edited on February 29, 2008 at 9:51 AM. Reason : tack]

2/29/2008 9:50:59 AM

Quote :

"One possible point about the whole 320 vs 325 bearing issue... From what I understand (nautical people please feel free to step in here), a bearing of 360 (or 0) is generally taken to be headed due North from wherever you happen to be. So 325 and 320 are bearings headed slightly west of north from the island. Now let's say that the location of the helicopter on the beach is east of the location of the dock from where Michael left. And let's say that there's a safe spot off the coast of the island where nobody does any consciousness time traveling. Then, as per the attached drawing, 320 from one spot might hit the same safe spot that 325 from another spot hits."

http://facethewoods.com/lost/index.php?topic=267.0

2/29/2008 9:56:15 AM

i think it is that things get stuck in the border b/w the island and the rest of the world. time passes at the same rate on the 2 places, but when you travel between, you can get stuck and alot of time can pass w/out you realizing it.

2/29/2008 11:22:21 AM

^ yeah, that sounds about right.
it wasn't clear to me, though, what happened to the helicopter. They left "at dusk", and arrived at "mid-day". I guess that means mid-day the next day, because on the island Jack talked to them a whole day later. That means that an entire night passed while they were on the helicopter without them noticing. It got pretty dark when they were in the storm head, but i don't know if it was clear that they went through an entire night....

2/29/2008 11:32:30 AM

I personally think that as you cross that boundary between the island and the real world, there is some sort of time delay.

It is entirely dependent on how fast you move through the boundary as to what the delay is.

Because the rocket was moving fast, the delay was minimal (31 minutes).

Because the helicopter was slower, the delay was several hours.

So think about time on the island and in the real world progressing at the same rate, but crossing that boundary causes some kind of time delay.

Jack/everyone have crossed the boundary once, when the plane entered. Sayid has crossed it twice.

Just a wild thought. (which others above have also posted)

[Edited on February 29, 2008 at 12:10 PM. Reason : .]

2/29/2008 12:07:26 PM

yeah, def something up with "the border". I'd call it an event horizon, this guy calls it The Bubble

http://lost-and-gone-forever.blogspot.com/2008/02/constant-instant-reactions.html

Quote :

"Time. So where does this lead us regarding funky time? Well, as Sayid mentioned - they left at dusk, and arrived on the Freighter in the middle of the day - which would coincide with the present time on the Island. Since Jack and Sayid, and Penny and Desmond were able to communicate together - the date and time must be consistent on the Island, on the Freighter, and in the Real World... but time is LOST traveling to and from the Island, when you pass through the Bubble. Let the record show that the bearing Frank followed was 305... the bearing that Ben gave Michael was 325... did Ben intentionally send Michael in the wrong direction? Or is there some degree of standard deviation in the path through the Bubble?"

remember Ben's right-hand-man, back in S2 or S3? He was shown back in the 70s when Ben came to the island as a kid. Then in modern day, 30 something years later, he is still there and seems not to have aged all that much. I wonder if he spent a lot of time sitting on the bubble or something...

2/29/2008 12:24:17 PM

I think event horizon is a great term to describe it, im gonna steal that.

2/29/2008 12:27:37 PM

Quote :

"I think when he saw the note in his notebook, it instantly all came back to him, just like it did for desmond"

Oh okay so Desmond did get his memory back, I was wondering about that.

2/29/2008 12:41:21 PM

^ I think that he did, considering the emphasis he put on saying "Sayid". He also told Penny he had been on an island.

Granted, both of these things were told to him after his pseudo-amnesia, but the confidence in his voice makes me think he remembered it all.


I'm surprised no one else has brought this up:
Desmond and Sayid have a friend on the freighter

This makes me believe Michael is Ben's man on the boat. Especially since he decides to help Sayid/Desmond (any other spy Ben has probably wouldn't) yet wants to stay anonymous (he opens the door and then leaves? I'm sure Sayid and Desmond are still pretty pissed at him for shooting two their friends.)

2/29/2008 12:54:28 PM

Quote :

"Im pretty sure faraday was having mild symptoms like desmond was, and couldnt remember his experiments. "

Like when they first introduced his character, he was watching TV and it said they found flight 815 in the ocean and he started to cry. Some woman asked him why he was crying and he said he didn't know.... I guess this is why.

What I am confused about is, we know Desmond originally got kicked out of the army for some reason (from his first flashback in season 2). Was it a different reason before, and now after traveling back in time it is because he flipped out as we saw in this episode, or was it always because he flipped out as in this episode, he just didn't remember anything we saw in this episode (the 1996 part) when he left for his race around the world?

2/29/2008 1:05:42 PM

^ yeah the problem with time travel is that it goes against everything humans intuitively assume about time travel. So even if you can make a logical story line that accounts for every moment of time, people are still confused because of general conceptions or misconceptions about time travel.

2/29/2008 1:30:10 PM

Am I the only one who doesn't believe that Michael is the one on the boat? Unless he's using a fake name that the boat's company believes is real, then he would be on the plane manifest and be "caught" before ever getting aboard.

2/29/2008 1:55:18 PM

or he's hiding on the boat and they haven't found him

2/29/2008 1:56:54 PM

I personally dont think its Michael on the boat either.

2/29/2008 1:59:32 PM

I personally dont think its Michael on the boat either.

2/29/2008 2:03:15 PM

its clearly jacob on the boat

2/29/2008 2:09:57 PM

its walt on the boat.
duh.


nobody would notice a 14 year old black kid who wasn't there before.





speaking of kids... are they ever going to bring back all the kids and other 'good' people who were stolen in the first or second season (can't remember). They haven't mentioned them in a long ass time, unless you count Ben telling the others to go to the temple/ruins or whatever

2/29/2008 2:16:54 PM

Also, on the subject of faraday not remembering things, remember when charlotte was messing with the cards?

I bet he was trying to use that as his constant to trigger the repair in his head.


Also, I wonder if the stuff they were injecting into the guy in the sick bay was the same stuff they were injecting themselves with in dharma (like desmond used to do every day).

2/29/2008 2:30:55 PM

Quote :

"Frank is told by Daniel to follow a bearing of 305, which is a Northwest direction. Eko's stick bore the inscription "Lift up your eyes and look north - John 3:05"

if thats intentional which it probably is, then its cool

2/29/2008 2:43:54 PM

^ of course it's intentional.

unfortunately, it's also not true.

http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=john%203:05&version=31

Quote :

" John 3:05 (New International Version) 5Jesus answered, "I tell you the truth, no one can enter the kingdom of God unless he is born of water and the Spirit."

it looks to me like the verse on Eko's stick was a combination of the following

Quote :

" Genesis 13:14 The LORD said to Abram after Lot had parted from him, "Lift up your eyes from where you are and look north and south, east and west. "

http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?book_id=1&chapter=13&verse=14&version=31&context=verse

Quote :

"Jeremiah 13:20 Lift up your eyes and see those who are coming from the north. "

http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?book_id=30&chapter=13&verse=20&version=31&context=verse

Quote :

"Deuteronomy 3:27 Go up to the top of Pisgah and look west and north and south and east. Look at the land with your own eyes, since you are not going to cross this Jordan."

http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?book_id=5&chapter=3&verse=27&version=31&context=verse

2/29/2008 2:55:08 PM

^ unfortunately?


that makes it a bit more interesting.

2/29/2008 3:01:28 PM

yeah, maybe. I say "unfortunately" because I think it would be really cool of John [Locke] 3:05 actually did say that.

It doesn't, though, so that's either a case where the writer's just pulled a fast one and hoped people wouldn't double check with the bible for a one-off line to make the rest of plotline that week make sense ("John" because of Locke, and 3[:]05 because of the directional heading), or maybe there is supposed to be something an intentional misquote.

2/29/2008 3:26:32 PM

maybe eko didn't remember the correct verse

2/29/2008 3:45:00 PM

here's my problem with time travel:

how is it certain that Daniel was going to teach Eloise the rabbit how to run the maze in the next hour? just because you intend to teach the rabbit doesn't mean you will. I could say I'm going to do something...but until I actually do, it has never happened...

same with your theories about Daniel knowing that Desmond will be alive and well in the future and thus making him his constant. man i really hate to get into a free will vs predestination debate...

its impossible to know with 100% certainty that the future told to you in the present will be the future when you get there. there are too many factors to ensure that things will happen as expected.

so mainly i have a problem with travelling into the future. travelling in the past is easy and makes sense. i don't have a problem with Desmond knowing that locke was going to make a speech or knowing that charlie was going to die multiple times because that was essentially him coming back to the past, from the future, which was his current present at the time.

I do however have a problem with the rabbit going forward in time and understanding how the maze works. Plus you can't talk to a rabbit to understand what it actually experienced. So unless Daniel has been time travelling since 1996, he can't really give a valid explanation for time travelling into the future based on a rabbit.

And if you can't really control this mental time travelling...then it makes sense that you would totally go crazy. Too much information to consume and digest for the brain.

[Edited on February 29, 2008 at 6:55 PM. Reason : btw...Desmond = more interesting than the camp sites...]

2/29/2008 6:50:47 PM

You do not time travel as we know it, isn't real right? Nobody as far as we know has ever done it. So the writers are just following gidelines that have been used before in other movies/books I suppose since nobody really know how it works.


And haven't you seen Bill and Teds Excellent Adventure. That should be THE time travel reference.

Quote :

"I do however have a problem with the rabbit going forward in time and understanding how the maze works."

Thats not what happened. The rabbit from the future went back in time and did the maze because he was in the future and already knew how to do it.

[Edited on February 29, 2008 at 8:30 PM. Reason : .]

2/29/2008 8:28:49 PM

exactly, time is all perspective.


From our point of view, the rabbit had never done the maze, but to the rabbit, it had.

2/29/2008 8:59:23 PM

Quote :

"You do not time travel as we know it, isn't real right?"

Quote :

"Thats not what happened. The rabbit from the future went back in time and did the maze because he was in the future and already knew how to do it. "

A stimulus was put on the rabbit in the PRESENT to send it to the FUTURE to learn something that may or may not have been taught to the rat. That makes no sense at all. We can't verify that the dude showed the rat how to do the maze.

THEORETICAL SITUATION: Lets say, Daniel zaps the rat with radiation. The radiation is supposed to send the rat's consciousness through time. The rat comes back to present time and runs a maze its never seen before. Now let's suppose that Daniel chooses to never show the rat how to run the maze. How could that be possible? It can't.

Also, has the rat been zapped with radiation before or was this the first time? Its presumed that its been zapped a bunch of times. Does the radiation exposure immediately stimulate the mental time travel? And if so, how can it logically travel to the future if it hasn't happened yet?

The only thing that makes sense is that you can travel to the future only if you've travelled to the past...in which case the future is only the future to the people in the past. So if you're Desmond and you're time travelling, you are travelling to the past from the present...not the future.

[Edited on February 29, 2008 at 9:11 PM. Reason : don't know why i called it a rabbit...]

2/29/2008 9:11:18 PM

Quote :

"A stimulus was put on the rabbit in the PRESENT to send it to the FUTURE to learn something that may or may not have been taught to the rat. That makes no sense at all. We can't verify that the dude showed the rat how to do the maze. "

How do you know the stimulus that was put on the rat didn't retreive the future rats mind and bring it to the past/present(this being the time they are in his office)? Thats the way I took it. As I am sure a lot more people on here did.

[Edited on February 29, 2008 at 9:14 PM. Reason : .]

2/29/2008 9:12:52 PM

Quote :

"How do you know the stimulus that was put on the rat didn't retreive the future rats mind and bring it to the past/present(this being the time they are in his office)?"

How do you retrieve something that doesn't exist yet?

[Edited on February 29, 2008 at 9:21 PM. Reason : fucking parallel bullshit]

2/29/2008 9:17:00 PM

^^
Hahah reminds me of:
http://tomahawk.ytmnd.com/

2/29/2008 9:21:14 PM

Stuff in the future must exist because Fraday said you can't change whats in the future. So there must be something there to change, or else he would have just said in the future nothing is set in stone.

Its kind of pointless to even argue over because there really is no "expert" on time travel. And if there is, it sure as hell isn't one of us.

And time travel into the future is technically possible. If you were able to build a time machine that could go the speed of light...186,000miles per second, time in theory, stops. But the mass of the craft would shrink to nothing and cease to exist.

2/29/2008 9:21:34 PM

^^hahahahahaha

also...the rat dies

and...since it went to the future and learned the maze before actually learning the maze and then died...

it never learned the maze

yet was able to run the maze

without learning the maze

that's why time travel to the future and back is fucked up

and why time travel from the present to the past makes a lot more sense

[Edited on February 29, 2008 at 9:27 PM. Reason : of course time travel to the future exists...I'm doing it right now...]

Quote :

"Stuff in the future must exist because Fraday said you can't change whats in the future"

yeah...like the sentence in his journal about Desmond being his constant wasn't there before but totally just appeared because he sent Desomd back to find him in the past....

[Edited on February 29, 2008 at 9:30 PM. Reason : asdfghjkl;]

2/29/2008 9:26:21 PM

Quote :

"How do you retrieve something that doesn't exist yet?"

From the writers point of view (as seen in many of Daniels sketches) time becomes a dimension, which can be moved between, just like the 3 dimensional space that we know.


Imagine having grown up in a 2d world, depth would be unfathomable. They're just suggesting that the rat switches places with the rat in the future sort of like teleportation, except in the dimension of time.



its not time travel, its skipping moments of time, forward or backwards. You have to let go of the feeling that time is the same thing as conscious state that you are in, and try to understand it as something that is independent of human consciousness.

2/29/2008 9:29:47 PM

Like I said, who said it went to the future, learned it, and then went back? What I am saying, is the device connected the present rat to the future rat, and the future rats mind went back in time to the present rats mind in the office and ran the maze.

Obviusly you seem to be trolling, which is fine.


Also, this is a pretty interesting read. By no means total expert knowledge, but still interesting.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_travel

2/29/2008 9:31:02 PM

time as a dimension.

2/29/2008 9:33:13 PM

and i'm saying...what if present rat is never taught the maze and future rat knows the maze...then they are not the same rat.

2/29/2008 9:36:48 PM

But then you would have to reject desmond ever going into the past, because all of that already happened and if he did it in the past then future desmond would've already known that.


they're just saying time isn't a chronology.

2/29/2008 9:37:52 PM

I'm obviously trolling because I'm discussing valid critiques of the chosen time travel plot device...

2/29/2008 9:38:47 PM

i mainly have a problem with the whole rat scenario explanation since you can't talk to a rat...its a lame excuse, but it is what it is

^^but see, you're confusing future Desmond for present Desmond. We never see future Desmond. We only see past desmond and present Desmond, where present Desmond is our focal point.

We've even seen present Desmond and past Desmond at the same time (when he knows Locke's speech and how Charlie keeps almost dying). But we never see future Desmond. We never see future Desmond because they know they can't really do a believable scenario that would allow for us to see future Desmond.

2/29/2008 9:44:12 PM

i meant future desmond as 2004, and the present as 1996 because of the rat.

2/29/2008 9:46:20 PM

^in that respect...Desmond came to the present from the future while the rat went to the future from the present

Future Daniel told Future Desmond to go back and find him in 1996 because he knows exactly where he was and exactly what he was doing in 1996

Present Daniel "told" the Present Rat to bring back maze knowledge from 1 hour in the future that may or may not exist 1 hour into the future

there's an uncertainty factor in going to the future from the present that can't be accounted for. going back in time makes a lot more sense due to the experiences that have already occured.


[you can't tell me exactly every detail about how your day will be tomorrow, but you can definitely tell me exactly what happened to you yesterday]

[Edited on February 29, 2008 at 9:54 PM. Reason : dilemma]

2/29/2008 9:52:03 PM

again i say, dimension not chronology.



Its not a series of events, but the ability of events to exist in space.
of course, we're arguing about something which is probably impossible.

[Edited on February 29, 2008 at 9:56 PM. Reason : of course]

2/29/2008 9:55:58 PM

simply saying time is a dimension doesn't explain plausibility

i'm willing to say--sure, all pasts, presents and futures are occurring simultaneously independent of each other.

but travelling between them all starts to not make sense....especially if you're travelling to the future

also, if you assume time is a dimension and all time is independent of each other...then that challenges free will...which is probably what's really bugging me

2/29/2008 10:04:20 PM

^ well i don't believe in completely free will, so gg.


i believe that we aren't completely in control of the majority ~95% of our decisions/actions.

2/29/2008 10:13:15 PM

^so if i show up at your house and punch you in the face, it's not my fault, right?

I like the idea that there are an infinite number of universes with unique timelines. Traveling into the past means travelling to a different universe where the timeline has always included you showing up at that past moment and affecting the 'present'.

2/29/2008 10:41:07 PM

the infinite universe theory is just a theoretical physics though experiment, i don't think it really helps with determining what's going on here.

here's some info from the producer's podcast

Quote :

"- The executive producers offered this explanation for the events of "The Constant": In 1996, Desmond suddenly traveled forward into his body in 2004. The people and the locations that were a part of his 2004 self were unfamiliar, which is why he couldn't remember Sayid at first. - Lindelof and Cuse said that Lost differs from other film and TV approaches to time travel (Heroes, for example) in that there are no time paradoxes. Nothing that the characters do during time travel can change the future or the present. There is no alternate-reality version of Jack that exists in another dimension. - Many fans have questions about "The Constant," particularly about how Penny's conversation with Desmond (about him calling eight years later) fits in with their meeting outside the stadium in "Live Together, Die Alone" (which occurred after the events of "The Constant"). Damon Lindelof advised fans to listen to Mrs. Hawking's explanation of course correction in "Flashes Before Your Eyes.""

http://www.tvsquad.com/2008/02/29/lost-audio-podcast-recap-february-29-2008/

2/29/2008 10:57:53 PM

so where is the explanation? we're gonna need the script please

[Edited on March 1, 2008 at 12:18 AM. Reason : .]

3/1/2008 12:17:34 AM

we have free will but we've already made all of our decisions. We just haven't seen them yet. Kind of like a computer model has the weather for the next week already mapped out. The weather can technically do whatever it wants to do but time is not a chronology so the decision you're going to make 10 years from now has already been determined...by you...in the future.

"future you" has already used his free will to make every decision you will ever make, freely, if you will

3/1/2008 1:02:32 AM

^ is what you believe.

3/1/2008 1:07:07 AM