mac_the_mike

Current Mood: curious

• Yesterday's Enterprise: Here's my prediction for the season 6 premiere of  "Lost":  Open with the flash of light at the Swan station as the bomb goes off.  Cut to the familiar flashback of Jack on flight 815.  There's that bit of turbulence we've seen in flashbacks so many times before.  Jack looks worried.  The pilot comes on the intercom to announce that everything is fine.  They're just flying through a rough patch.  Then... nothing.  No additional turbulence, no plane being ripped apart.  Just  a normal flight.  Cut to LAX.  Flight 815 has arrived.  Passengers begin to deplane.  Locke in a wheelchair.  Kate in handcuffs.  Boone and Shannon.  Ana Lucia.  Eko.  Libby.  Artz.  Froggert.  Nikki and Pallo.  Charlie.  Jack walks off.  He sees Ana Lucia.  "That flight was pretty rough.  You look like you could use another tequila and tonic," he says.  "The airport bar's right over there," she replies.  Cut to the airport bar.  Ana Lucia is being handed a drink by the bartender.  All we see of the bartender is a hand --  a woman's hand -- an African American woman's.  Suddenly, there's a tremendous flash of light.  The airport windows shatter behind Jack and Ana Lucia.  We see a mushroom cloud form over LA.  Cut to the bartender.  It's Whoopi Goldberg in a funny outfit and huge hat.  In fact, it's Guinen.  "This isn't right" she says.  "It's not supposed to be this way."

• Miles and Smokey: There's some connection between Miles and the Smoke Monster.  They both seem to have the same ability to read dead people.  In the episode "Some Like it Hoth" Miles explains to Hugo that while Miles knows facts that he could only have obtained from a particular person who was dead at the time, Miles does not talk to dead people -- unlike Hugo who does.  Miles tells Hugo that a dead person's brain has stopped working, therefore the dead can't engage in conversation.  All that's left of the deceased is who they were and what they knew at the time of death.  This ability of Miles' to extract information from the brains of the dead seems to be similar to what the Smoke Monster can do.  Smokey has appeared in various guises throughout the series: as Christian to Jack, as Boone to Locke, as Yemi to Eko, as Alex to Ben, as Locke to everyone.  What do these characters have in common, Christian, Boone, Yemi, Alex, and Locke?  They are all dead, and all their bodies are on the Island.  This may be why Locke had to die, and why his body had to come back to the island -- so that Smokey could take his form in order to manipulate Ben into killing Jacob.  Note that it was Smokey-as-Locke who caused Locke to die.  Smokey-as-Locke told Alpert to tell the real Locke that he had to get the other 815 survivors to come back to the Island and that in order to do so, Locke would have to die.  That prophesy is what caused Locke to attempt suicide.  The flaw in my theory is that it does not explain Walt's appearance to Locke, Hugo's vision of "Dave", or Kate's vision of the black horse.  Neither Walt, Dave, nor the horse are corpses on the Island.

• I see dead people: Hugo's experience with the dead is quite different than Miles'.  Hugo has visions of the dead in which he holds conversations with them, and even plays chess with the dead.  Interestingly, the dead people with whom Hugo talks are also, as in Miles' case, always people who died on the island.  Hugo has seen Charlie, Ana Lucia, and Eko.  Are Hugo's visions manifestations of the Smoke Monster?  Hugo's visions have all occurred off Island.  We don't know whether Smokey can leave the Island.  I think Hugo's visions are something else.  All the dead people Hugo has seen are people who would not have died had 815 not crashed.  If detonating Jughead at the Swan station in 1977 prevented 815 from crashing in 2004, then Charlie, Ana Lucia, and Eko would all be alive in an alternate time line.  Perhaps, Hugo is seeing manifestations of those people from an alternate reality, as if their consciousness have somehow leaked through the barrier between realities.  Alternately, perhaps Hugo's visions are manifestations of a smoke-being, but a different one than is on the island.  Perhaps both Jacob, and the black-shirted man who wants to kill Jacob have their own smoke-being, each one capable of assuming the form of a dead person whose body is on the island, but only Jacob's smoke-being can be off-Island.  Note the lack of overlap between the dead people who have appeared as visions on the Island (Christian, Boone, Yemi, Alex, and Locke)  and those who have appeared off-Island (Charlie, Anna Lucia, Eko, and Libby). [Update: I had forgotten that Christian appeared to Jack off-Island] Perhaps each corpse on the Island falls under control of either Jacob, or his black-shirted opponent.

• Backgammon: Way back in Season 1 (in the pilot, I think) Locke teaches Walt how to play backgammon.  Locke tells Walt that backgammon is an ancient game, older than chess, and that it pits two opponents against each other: one light and one dark.  This struck me as foreshadowing at the time.  And now with the Season 5 finale, we know what it foreshadowed: Jacob wearing a white shirt, and his opponent wearing a black shirt, engaged in a centuries long disagreement.  The man in the black shirt, upon seeing the sailing ship (the Blackrock?) on the horizon, asks Jacob "You're still trying to prove me wrong aren't you?"  Wrong about what, I wonder.  What's their disagreement?  Mr. Blackshirt seems to be a fatalist.  "They come.  They fight.  They destroy.  They corrupt.  It always ends the same," he insists.  Jacob, on the other hand, is a progressive. "It only ends once.  Anything that happens before that is just progress".  Jacob is a big believer in free will.  He tells Hugo that Hugo can chose whether or not he will get on flight 316 back to the Island.  He tells Ben that Ben has a choice whether or not to kill him.  This attitude stands in sharp contrast to that of Locke (both before and after resurrection) who is constantly talking about people's destinies, and what is "supposed" to happen.  Supposed by whom?  Again, a clue can be found all the way back in the series' pilot episode.  Charlie writes on his four bandaged fingers, four letters: F, A, T, E.  Fate versus free will, a cycle of doom versus progress -- that's the debate between Mr. Blackshirt and Jacob, and all the events of the series consist of moves by one side or the other in a cosmic game of backgammon to resolve that debate.

• Childhood's End: What is this final "end" to which Jacob refers, and before which everything else he believes to be mere progress?  The biggest end looming in the Lost mythology is the end of the human race itself.  The Valenzetti equation predicted a 100% chance of the human race ending in the near future.  But the end of the human race doesn't have to mean the death of the human race or even the death of any individual humans.  Humanity might end by evolving into something else, something better.  A post-human future.  Aaron might be the first of these post-humans to be born.  The conflict between Mr Blackshirt and Jacob might be a conflict over this future with Mr. Blackshirt believing that humanity can't change, that we are intrinsically corrupting, and that the best we can hope for is to muddle through our cycles of violence over and over again, hopefully never acquiring enough power to totally destroy ourselves.  That's why Mr. Blackshirt wants to keep people away from the Island and the tremendous power it hides.  That's why Mr. Blackshirt employs the Smoke Monster, a security system designed to protect humanity from itself by protecting the power of the Island from people.  And that's why he wants to kill Jacob.  Jacob believes that humanity can change, that we can choose not to be destructive, and that the power of the Island can be a catalyst to usher in a new post-human race.  Jacob keeps bringing people to the Island in the name of progress towards this goal.  The clock is ticking.  Now that humanity has nuclear weapons, we don't need the power of the island to kill ourselves.  If we don't evolve soon, we may not make it to the threshold.

The first thing to note about time travel is that it creates a causality loop.  If you travel back in time to 2004, your memories of 2006 can be the partial cause of your actions in 2004.  Obviously the events in 2006 were partially the effect of events in 2004, including your actions in 2004 as a time traveler from 2008.  So events in 2004 are the partial cause of events in 2006 which are the partial cause of events in 2008 which are, through time travel, the cause of events in 2004. One of the implications of this is that if you follow the chain of causality around the loop you can arrive at the same date an unlimited number of times.  

There was a time travel movie with Christopher Reeves and Jane Seymour in which Christopher Reeves’ character finds a pocket watch in an attic in an old house.  He travels back in time with the watch to a time when the house was new and then leaves the watch in the attic.  That means the watch could have been through that loop any number of times.  It could be thousands of years old when our version of Christopher Reeves picks it up.  Since any given date can occur multiple times.  You can think of them as having numbers such as 9/24/2004.1 and 9/24/2004.2, etc.   

Self referential systems like this can have strange properties. (Hofstader’s “strange loops” from Godel, Esher, Bach).  Specifically, the phenomena of constructive and destructive interference can occur.  Consider the sound made by striking the rim of a fine crystal wine glass.  The impact of your finger creates vibrations in the glass in a broad spectrum of frequencies.  These sound waves travel around the glass lay on top of themselves.  Some of the waves cancel themselves out.  The nth iteration of a wave with a particular wave length might be pushing the glass molecules towards the center of the glass at the same time that the (n+1)th iteration pushes the glass molecules out.  Other frequencies reinforce themselves.  If the glass circumference is 7 inches, then a wavelength of 7 inches will reinforce itself, as will all integer multiples of that frequency (3.5” wavelength, 1.75” wavelength, etc.)  The clear sound we hear are those frequencies.

A causal loop can also have constructive and destructive interference.  Suppose a time traveler from 2008 decided to prevent the Great War by saving Archduke Ferdinand, and he went back in time and indeed stopped the assassination.  By doing so he prevents anyone in 2008 from even worrying about the effects of WW1, because WW1 never happened.  But that, of course, means that the time traveler never goes back in time to stop the assassination.  The time loop cancels itself out.  Other trips one could take might be self reinforcing.  If you wanted to be the cause of the assassination of Ferdinand, for example, you might create a self reinforcing time loop.

The key point is that the number of iterations of the self reinforcing loops will far surpass the number of self-cancelling iterations.  Possibly infinitely more iterations. This is where the strangeness really begins.  Suppose the inventor of the time machine financed his creation with the money he won in the Mega Millions lottery in 1998.  This time traveler goes back in time to a point several years before his winning lotto drawing – not with any intention of changing anything, mind you – just as a tourist at, say, the last Beatles concert.  Chaos Theory tells us that even small changes, such as the flapping of a butterfly’s wings, can have large effects later on.  So by going back to 1966 and just breathing, our time traveler changes the random atmospheric conditions that the little ping-pong balls see in his lotto drawing decades later, essentially re-randomizing the drawing.  He has only about a 1 in 15 million chance of re-winning the lotto, right?  Except that for each of those 15 million losing lotto drawings, no time machine is ever invented and each of those 15 million time lines occurs only once.  But, that one time in 15 million when the lotto hits the same numbers, that time line forms a loop and is repeated ad infinitum.  So when the time traveler arrives in 1966 what are the odds that he is in a version of the past that is self-cancelling? 15,000,000:∞ against.  In other words zero.  The odds of being in a self-cancelling time loop are zero.  This effect might even apply to small paradoxes, courtesy of the Butterfly Effect.  If the time traveler has a memory of the Kansas City Royals winning the 1985 World Series, then anything he might do in 1966 has a zero chance of preventing the Royals from winning the 1985 World Series.

The upshot of all this is that the normal rules of probability do not always apply to time travelers.  Even probabilistic natural laws such as the Second Law of Thermodynamics wouldn’t apply in cases where a paradox is at issue.  Imagine what this law might look like to our hypothetical do-gooder time-traveler who wishes to stop the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand.  No matter how well prepared he is, or how committed to the cause, something always stops him, no matter how unlikely it might seem.  It will appear to our time traveler to be bad luck, to be fate, to be a curse.  He might be walking down a street in Serbia in 1914 and suddenly get struck by a freak lightning bolt on a sunny day.  To a non-time-travelling observer in 1914 such an occurrence would look very strange indeed.

Which brings us, at long last, to “Lost”.  My theory is that our castaways are in a time loop -- a time loop that has already been through thousands or gazillions of iterations.  All the strange coincidences in our protagonist’s back-stories are the result of constructive interference in the time loop.  The ends of this loop must extend well before any of our protagonists were born, because their whole lives contain these coincidences.  The coincidences are all things that would be highly improbable in the absence of the time loop but are occurring in order to rectify a time traveler’s concerted attempts to change his past. And who is trying to change the past?  Dharma for one.  Alvar Hanso set out to change the coefficients of the Valenzetti equation to prevent the end of the world.  One of the ways he tried to do so is to take advantage of a temporal instability on the island to create a time machine and change events in the past.  But it can’t be done.  The 815ers were sent to the island by fate at least in part to stop the Swan Station operation in a manner that doesn’t cause a paradox.  Locke had to be there to push the button while Desmond was away.  Desmond had to come back, and be induced to turn the destruct key after Locke lost hope and stopped pushing the button. When Desmond traveled back in time and wanted to marry Penny, the time-traveling woman in the jewelry store explained to Desmond that it was his fate to go on that sailing race and go to the island because he had to turn that key.  When Desmond learned that Charlie was going to die, there was nothing Desmond could do to prevent it.  It’s fate.  Which by the way, is what was written on Charlie’s knuckles in the first episode: “fate”. 

In addition to Dharma, the other consequential time traveler is Jacob.  Jacob is from the distant future.  And he’s not a human.  He’s a post-human.  You see the end-of-the-world predicted by the Valenzetti equation is not the physical destruction of the world a la Alderan after the Death Star.  It’s the end of the world for humanity specifically.  The end of humanity does not come from nuclear war or disease, but from evolution.  A new species of people descends from us and replaces us.  Jacob is one of them.  And the Others are a group of people dedicated to midwifing this new species into the world.  That’s why they are following Jacob.  Jacob is himself caught in some terrible paradox trap.  Only when the circumstances that produce the potential for this paradox are eliminated will Jacob be freed.  The 815 survivors will play a crucial role in that.

So what’s different about these post-humans?  They are the people with special powers from “Heros”.  “Heros” and “Lost” are part of the same story arc.  Jacob is a time traveler like Hiro, or like Peter.