RELATIVE

Scientists have used Einstein's Theory of Relativity to calculate how time is measured in deep space flights. The conclusion is itself a paradox. For a deep space mission, the astronauts may age much more slowly traveling at the speed of light. For example, they may age 28 years on a light speed travel across the universe, but return to Earth 1,300 years later.

The fact that deep space travel can cause a return trip to take 1,300 years in "local" time explains why aliens have never returned to Earth.

Another factor in deep space travel is that human beings do not do well with forces over 1 g. We are basically water bags that can pop under pressure. Scientists think the best deep space travelers would be spiny, thin, small alien grays.

As private space firms have advertised in their speculative missions to colonize Mars, even solar system space travel is a one way street.  If you plan to go out into deep space, the chance of your returning home is near zero.

Which brings us to a hypothesis in LOST.

Some believe the island may have been some lost alien space craft. If true, then Jacob, the island guardian would have been the alien pilot and his brother his co-pilot. If these space aliens came from a distant solar system with advanced technology, they could have crash landed on Earth without the means of repairing their ship.

The clues of being space aliens comes in the form of their physical presence. Jacob and especially MIB appear to be shape-shifting smoke monsters. They can change their physical structure, morph into human beings or monsters. This would make sense for deep space travelers to avoid the pitfalls of human bodies. If these alien travelers were not humanoids but energy beings, they could survive deep space flight.

A further clue on the island aliens is that Jacob's narrative that people who come to the island are from "shipwrecks."  This mirrors his own situation. By bringing people to the island looking for a solution to his problem, Jacob cleverly puts the humans in the same position he is in: lost, looking for a way "home."

And the human beings brought to the island have been a clever bunch. Dharma and the military brought vast resources including nuclear technology and experimentation on electromagnetic properties including time travel. Perhaps these Earth technologies were being used to try to re-boot the space craft island so Jacob could indeed return "home" as MIB kept saying to the castaways. But MIB continues to get frustrated with the humans who want to take their advanced technology and use it to increase their own power on Earth. In order to control them, Jacob and MIB use human history of "gods" including borrowing ancient Egyptian rites, to control the humans on the island.

In essence, the series concludes not with the humans getting home, but the aliens finding a way to end their existence on a distant planet far away from their home. After centuries of failed attempts to get their ship technology working, Jacob and MIB apparently release themselves from their species protections (the immortality we saw during the show) in order to cease to exist. In that way, their alien technology does not corrupt the Earth society as they had found humans to be barbaric and crude in their emotional states.

WARPING SPACE-TIME

One of the mysteries of the island was its ability to shift in time and space.

On June 30th, 1905, Albert Einstein started a revolution with the publication of theory of Special Relativity.  This theory, among other things, stated that the speed of light in a vacuum is the same for all observers, regardless of the source. In 1915, he followed this up with the publication of his theory of General Relativity, which asserted that gravity has a warping effect on space-time. For over a century, these theories have been an essential tool in astrophysics, explaining the behavior of the Universe on the large scale.

However, since the 1990s, astronomers have been aware of the fact that the Universe is expanding at an accelerated rate. In an effort to explain the mechanics behind this, suggestions have ranged from the possible existence of an invisible Dark Energy to the possibility that Einstein’s field equations of General Relativity.


As published in Universe Today, scientists from Japan using the Fiber Multi-Object Spectrograph (FMOS) on the Subaru Telescope created the deepest 3-D map of the Universe to date. All told, this map contains some 3,000 galaxies and encompasses a volume of space measuring 13 billion light-years.

Experimental results looking at the expansion of the universe, in comparison to that predicted by Einstein’s theory of general relativity in green. Credit: Kavli IPMU/Okumura et al.

As part of their effort to ascertain the origins of cosmic acceleration, this project relies on data collected by the Subaru telescope to create a survey that monitors the redshift of galaxies. The expansion of the universe has been accelerating since the universe entered its dark energy era, at redshift z≈0.4 (roughly 5 billion years ago). Within the framework of  Einstein's general relativity,  an accelerating expansion can be accounted for by a positive value of the cosmological constant.

If gravity can warp space-time in a way to show that the universe is expanding at an accelerated pace, then this can be the sci-fi basis for the island's time and space shifts. It would also mean that the frozen donkey wheel tie in to the island's unique electromagnetic energy could be complex or wrong. The Hatch was the station that kept the EM energy levels in check. It was the FDW that was turned to created a different result: time teleportation of matter (abet, selective matter and people which is a real continuity problem). If the island EM was intersecting a universal stream of dark energy gravity, that could explain why the island acted beyond the normal boundaries of Earth's physics. This intersection of two different properties could lead to the creation of micro-universes within the present universe. This warping of space-time at a localized level would have been of great value to the scientific, military and industrial world.