I will email your $1 post haste.

How ironic would it be if it turns out Daniel just assumed the Orchid drilling is what caused the Swan Incident, due to the close timing of the two events… but that if everyone didn’t end up running around trying to “stop” the Incident from happening with nuclear bombs and other exceedingly well thought out ideas, it never actually would have happened at all.

Not saying I expect it… but I’d enjoy it.

I still think the nature of this season’s WTH moment will be something catastrophic that seems to contradict WHH. Jack nuking the Island seems to fit the bill.

I still think that the timelines can be changed by time travel, except that we are only being shown one specific timeline which has already been affected by the losties previous time travel so it doesn’t seem possible.

A) Losties crash on the island
B) Losties go back in time
C) Losties shape events in the past that causes A)

According to our theory C cannot happen if A does not. However, we know A must happen because C has already happened.

But

It seems to me that there must be an original timeline where C did not happen, but instead something else happened that caused A and then got us into our ABC timeline.

I don’t think it is meaningless because if there was a timeline that we are not privy to it indicates the past can be changed by time travel. Just because the losties are part of a timeline that takes into account what they have already done in the past does not mean it can’t be changed.

I could see a situation in which our ABC timeline is always changing just slightly and some of the small changes could end up making big ones…

Maybe I’m way off base, but it seems like an interesting possibility even if it will not happen.

All of the clues imfromthepast has been putting together in his posts are grounded in the very nature of self-consistent time travel, or “What ever happened, happened,” so none of these predictions can possibly take us beyond our favorite time travelers’ trip Back to the Future. Even if everything above plays out and we watch Jack and the others CAUSE the incident just like we expected, the season will probably still have to end with a very big “WTF just happened” moment once again.

I, for one, am looking forward to it.

It seems that Salvation will just tie it all together in that we’ll actually see John sending his friend Kyle back in 198???.

I can’t say that I follow the TV show but I recon having seen Kyle as John’s friend and John obviously knowing that he will be his father. So he realizes that he must send him in the past to assure his own existence.

Granted, there are some pretty huge “WTF just happened!?!?” moments in this show’s history. In what is still quite possibly my favorite scene of the whole series, we find out that the man whose morning routine we’ve been following is actually living INSIDE THE HATCH, and that we’re watching the very moments that lead up to the explosion that opens the hatch for the first time. Likewise, in the original “flash-forward” scene, there were very, VERY few clues that the person about to get out of that car to speak to Jack could possibly be Kate, immediately revealing to us that they both somehow got off the island.

However, a large number of LOST’s major events and plot twists haven’t been a question of what’s going to happen, but of HOW and WHY are they going to happen. Just one year ago, in season 4′s finale for example, as big as it was when Ben first “moved the island,” we already knew from the previous episode that that’s exactly what he was going to do. Of course, that didn’t make it any less crazy or mind-blowing. I start with that because it was one of the biggest, but on a smaller scale was anyone really stunned to find out in “This Place Is Death” that Eloise Hawking was Faraday’s mother? In “The Variable,” were you shocked that Widmore was his father? Was anyone surprised to find out that Kate and Sawyer eventually escaped from Hydra island?

Rather than reducing the entire series to bullet points, I’ll just go ahead and get on with my point. When the show first started, we knew nothing. The characters were all strangers, the island was apparently deserted (although still quite creepy), and we didn’t know anything about any of the major players yet – DHARMA, Widmore, Richard Alpert, even Benjamin Linus were all unknown to us. Now, after nearly 5 years of reveals and plot development, we know a hell of a lot about what might be going on. Where in the first season even the simplest of plot twists was a complete shocker (there are OTHER PEOPLE on the island!?!?), we now have enough evidence to start to put together some of the pieces of this 6 season puzzle. That’s why so many of the major “reveals” of this season have really just been for the characters’ benefit (i.e. Pierre Chang is Miles’ dad) – because we as the viewers already have enough information that, with some critical thinking and the collective deductive ability of millions of rabid fans, we’ve been able to figure all of that stuff out on our own.

For basically the entire run of the show, they’ve been laying down clues for us to follow – remember, they planted time travel in your head LONG before anyone turned any subterranean wheels. The fact of the matter is, by this point we’re either going to start figuring out some stuff before it happens based on those clues… or the writers will have to force out-of-the-blue plot twists upon us just to keep us surprised… and anyone who’s watched recent seasons of 24 can see how well that turns out.

The document is a mathematical brief presenting a model that allows for changing the past and also has a contingency to prevent the formation of paradoxes.

If elaborates that any changes and alteration must be self-sustained. That is, the changes must create a series of events that lead to a similar future event as the original.

(Sorry, the link was broken)

In other words, if you were in a sealed room with a loaded gun, and you had foreknowledge that you sere going to die of a gunshot to the head, you would have to end up shooting yourself. Its not as if the gun was going to just go off for no reason, just to make sure the timeline stays intact.
That being said if you decided to tempt fate and threw the gun across the room to avoid dying, chances are the gun could go off and shoot you.

So would you agree then that Hawking is not changing anything with her course correction nonsense? She didn’t have to have the talk with him about him going to the island. She had to know he would do it, she was there, shot him for herself.