UFO

One of the great unsolved mysteries of LOST is the Island.

Some believe that the Island was its own character. That it may have been a supernatural being in its own right - - - so foreign to modern humans as to be "magic."

Others have tried to rationally explain the Island.

We know of few facts about the island:

1. It can move. During Faraday's rocket test, it was shown that the island was moving away from the ship. A real island cannot move across the ocean.

2. It had special light properties. When Faraday landed on the island, he remarked that the light was strange, that it may be bent. One of the theories of stealth technology is that the bending of light and reflection could cause an object to "disappear" to the naked eye. When the helicopter left the doomed freighter, Jack and those on the copter saw the island vanish without an ocean ripple.

3. It has unique electromagnetic properties. The Swan station was created to try to manage the EM properties so the island would remain in balance. When it was not in balance, the large purple flash would occur sending the island out of phase with time or space.

If you tie all three of these facts together you can come up with a plausible theory.

The island was a UFO.

Since earth islands are volcanic mountains that begin at the base of the ocean to crest above the water line, they do not move. Therefore, the Island is not an island.

Electromagnetic energy can be used as propulsion system. Several countries have been using technology to support monorail trains riding on a cushion of magnetism. The movement of the Island could be made as a result of the electromagnetism. This means that the Island has a powerful engine, probably underground in the forbidden zone, which allows the guardian to pilot the island to safety.

Stealth technology is also researching the use of bending light waves to mask radar patterns. Magicians use mirrors to make things disappear by light wave cancellation techniques. In a larger scale, the Island could mask itself by using EM energy to "bend" light waves to make the island disappear.

So what would be the purpose of a space alien having a stealth UFO in the Pacific Ocean?

Just as in other sci-fi shows like Star Trek, advanced space travelers would often create "observational posts" on primitive planets to gather data on the inhabitants, cultures and technology. A UFO disguised as an uncharted island would provide cover for any human wandering to it.

Further, mere observation could lead to more advanced testing and experimentation on humans. It was said that the guardian was the only person who could bring people to the island. The guardian must have been the captain of the ship. What better way to observe how humans interact than putting them in a survival situation on a dangerous island?

What would space aliens gain from such encounters? Information on human behavior, science experiments including DNA enhancement, mind control tests and possible allies in the off-island world. Wealthy people like Widmore may have been recruited by the Island aliens to obtain information that they could use (especially in defense technologies). The aliens could have given Widmore technology to make him rich, and in turn Widmore used his wealth and power to provide the Island with any resources it needed to survive, mostly human subjects.

UFO researchers believe that since the atomic age, at least 60 different space aliens have visited Earth and have been in contact with national governments. It may be too difficult for isolated ships to "conquer" the planet. But it probably easier to infiltrate world governments if aliens are after the planet's resources, such as gold which many scientists believe is a key element in deep space travel.

The UFO theory in LOST also answers the question about the long life of Jacob - - - he was not a human being. The smoke monster was not a human being. The aliens tried to breed human-alien hybrids on the island but those experiments failed (and why Juliet was summoned to the island). Space aliens could colonize Earth by interspecies procreation which would take human elements (compatible with Earth's environment) with the longevity of the alien races.

The UFO theory also can support the reason why Jacob and MIB wanted to "leave" the Island - - - they were so far away from their home planet their mission was a death sentence. They would rather die and end their existence than deal with the "never changing," corrupt and primitive humans.

Finally, with the real aliens gone, the Island ship would have been scuttled - - - which would explain the images of the Island resting on the ocean floor.

The Island as a UFO has some merit as being a plausible premise to the series.

DARK MATTER MODEL

Science wants to have unified answers to the Big Questions. So did LOST viewers.


A new physics model of the universe, formulated by Guillermo Ballestros at the University of Paris-Saclay in France and his colleagues, may be the answer to  explain dark matter, neutrino oscillations, baryogenesis, inflation and the strong CP problem.


Dubbed SMASH, the model is based on the standard model of particle physics, but has a few bits tacked on. The standard model is a collection of particles and forces that describes the building blocks of the universe. Although it has passed every test thrown at it, it can’t explain some phenomena.


For example,  science does not understand dark matter, the mysterious substance that makes up 84 per cent of the universe’s mass. Nor why there is more matter than antimatter. Nor why the universe grew so rapidly in its youth during a period known as "inflation."  

Something is still fundamentally missing from the standard model. Scientists think they new "new" particles to help balance or explain the formulas.


Some models, like supersymmetry,  add hundreds of particles – none of which have been spotted at colliders like the LHC. But SMASH adds only six: three neutrinos, a fermion and a field that includes two particles.

SMASH is several theories smashed together. It builds on Shaposhnikov’s model from 2005, which added three neutrinos to the three already known in order to solve four fundamental problems in physics: dark matter, inflation, some questions about the nature of neutrinos, and the origins of matter.
SMASH adds a new field to explain some of those problems a little differently. This field includes two particles: the axion, a dark horse candidate for dark matter, and the inflaton, the particle behind inflation.


As a final flourish, SMASH uses the field to introduce the solution to a fifth puzzle: the strong CP problem, which helps explain why there is more matter than antimatter in the universe.

Why is this important? Curiosity about the heavens has been the main focal point of humanity from the very beginning. Our first ancestors looked up to the sky and wondered what it was. The sun and the moon orbits fascinated people. They used the sky to help organize their lives to correspond to the seasons. Some sociologists believe that the questions about nature helped develop mankind's brain function to be the planet's alpha species. 


To unlock the building blocks of the universe may be the key to understanding everything: what causes cancer, why humans have a limited life span, what elements of the universe are or are not on Earth?


As these questions continue to puzzle science, they are also used by writers to speculate on how the lack of knowledge can be captured into dramatic prose. The "what if" premise of film and television shows stokes the curiosity of the viewer. If there is a real sci-fi backbone in the stories, it can mentor people to find scientific careers (as many NASA employees admit Star Trek did for them.)


LOST had an opportunity to inspire a new generation to science if it captured the essence of any new theory about the universe in its mythological story foundation. But it did not. It still remains a disappointing lapse by the show runners. These new scientific theories could have helped explain the time/space tangents, the strange EM radiation and the Numbers used in the Hatch.

BLACK HOLE

A black hole is a region of space in which gravity exerts such an enormous pull that nothing—not even light—can escape. That’s the simple definition of a black hole. But if you talk to a physicist, they’ll also describe a black hole as a region of very severely curved space-time—so sharply curved, in fact, that it’s “pinched off,” so to speak, from the rest of the universe.

This idea of curved space-time goes back to the work of Einstein. It was Einstein who put forward his theory of gravity, known as the general theory of relativity. According to the theory, matter curves, or distorts, the very fabric of space. A small object like Earth causes only a small amount of distortion; a star like our Sun causes more warping. And what about a very heavy, dense object? According to Einstein’s theory, if you squeeze enough mass into a small enough space, it will undergo a collapse, forming a black hole; the amount of warping will become infinite.

The boundary of the black hole is known as the “event horizon”—the point of no return. Matter that crosses the event horizon can never return to the outside. In this sense, the inside of a black hole is not even a part of our universe: Whatever might be happening there, we can never know about, since no signal from the inside can ever reach the outside. According to general relativity, the center of a black hole will contain a “singularity”—a point of infinite density and of infinitely curved space-time.

But what is "infinite density" and "infinite curved space time?" 

A personal theory is that it death.

The human body is made up of twisted molecules that produce cells that harness and retain energy. In one respect, each of us is their own universe. It is a self-contained complex system of checks, balances, functions and movements. Science thinks it knows how the human body works - - - but cannot produce it artificially by combining chemicals and energy in a test tube.

The spark of life is unique. So should be the amber of death.

In major religions, when a person dies they are "reborn" in the afterlife, whether it be heaven with the spirits of one's ancestors and loved ones, to be reincarnated as another life form on Earth. In some ways, this is a comfort to the living that death itself has a purpose. A continuation of life is a noble goal.

But if at the end, all energy in a person's body combines and pools itself in one last gasp to breathe life in the organic host, with such density as to leave the body - - -  one could say that a person's soul has left on another journey. If the soul is an encoded energy source, it could carry a person's thoughts, memories, stories, loves, hates, emotions, and dreams to the vastness of eternity. It could replay those life stories forever, or combine them with new souls to create new memories.

The latter seems to fall into the pattern of the final season of LOST, with the souls in the sideways world recombining to make new memories.

CRITICAL SCIENCE

Some researchers now see popular ideas like string theory and the multiverse as highly suspect. These physicists feel our study of the cosmos has been taken too far from what data can constrain with the extra "hidden" dimensions of string theory and the unobservable other universes of the multiverse. Of course, there are many scientists who continue to see great promise in string theory and the multiverse. But, as researchers wrote in the New York Times last year, it all adds up to muddied waters and something some researchers see as a "crisis in physics."

Some scientists believe this crisis is real — and it's acute. They pull no punches in their sense that the lack of empirical data has led the field astray. As they put it:

"Science is corrupted when it abandons the discipline of empirical validation or dis-confirmation. It is also weakened when it mistakes its assumptions for facts and its ready-made philosophy for the way things are."

Fraud in academics is not new. One of the reasons that spawns concerns is that huge government education grants target specific research which may bias independent research.

For example, global warming studies have sent billions of research dollars into academia. However, critics view scientists creating their own "computer models" to study the Earth's temperature defy one of science's fundamental processes: observation, recordation, interpretation, and thesis. If you start with a pre-determined scientific thesis, you work backwards in order to create a result.

If the Earth is warming, the vast majority of funded scientists claim it is man made pollution or CO2 emissions (which have to contained, regulated and taxed by the same governments funding the studies). But these studies fail the third grade smell test. Who did not learn in elementary school that the climate of our planet is determine by the solar radiation of the sun, the orbit of the Earth and tilt of its axis? None of those factors are tested in current climate studies.

And the studies send alarm bells to the general public who are not told that the Earth has had cycles of warm periods and cold periods (including ice ages). The dinosaurs that lived in tropical climates that people visit at museums were dug up in currently chilly Montana.

Another example is the daily headline that some study has found something GOOD for your health or something is BAD for your health. You have to look to the fine print to find out who funded the study. If a manufacturing or product lobbying group funded the research with a "pro" conclusion, there may be serious bias built in the result. Or if a study claims "meat" is toxic death but it was funded by a vegan environmental group, you have to take the results with a grain of salt.

Science needs critical thinking in order to make real breakthroughs.

If big pharma companies continue to poor millions in R&D to help symptoms of disease (with numerous side effects), they are not looking for a cure for the underlying disease. There are still only a handful of actual vaccines for known diseases. It is odd that with the advancement in medical technology that more cures have not been found.

Some believe that genetic and DNA manipulation are the keys to finding breakthrough medical treatments. But none of the basic childhood vaccines needed genetic testing in order to be found and manufactured for the masses.

Many of the cures were found by scientists and physicians who were looking for a solution to solve a real life problem in their practices. They were not out to make money but to make a contribution to public health. It may be a sentimental folly to ask that today's researchers shed their green colored visors to look for the greater good when there is so much money to be made in modern medicine.

EXPERIMENTS ON THE UNIVERSE

Man has forever looked up in the sky and wondered about it.

So man has always had a quest to understand the universe. Every culture on the planet has wrapped its mythology around the mysteries of the universe, the stars, the sun and the movement in the sky.

We have advanced far enough to begin to experiment about the universe.
  
The Large Hadron Collider slams beams of subatomic particles — traveling at more than 99.999999% the speed of light — together in the most energetic head-on hits you can imagine.
The heaping piles of scientific data generated from these powerful mashups, and seen by giant detectors like the one above, is enough to fill 100,000 dual-layer, single-sided DVDs each year. And this data is fueling countless science projects across the globe conducted by more than 10,000 researchers, engineers, and students.

These projects probe and test the fundamental laws of physics that govern our understanding of the universe.

What are the basic building blocks of space and time? Does the universe expand? Is gravity in deep space? What is on the other side of a black hole? Why do we exist when our other solar system planets have no life?

By smashing atoms together to see what happens is trying to re-create our own birthright. Are we part of a large chain reaction of events billions of years ago from the explosion-implosion of matter and energy?

Or our we insignificant lab rats on some other intelligent life form's desk?

Scientists and writers are fascinating with the probabilities. They are searching for a way we can explore the universe like in Star Trek or Star Wars. Is there elements (such as anti-matter) that can make us travel through space-time faster than the speed of light (breaking a rule of known physics)? 

And is this bridge between our known scientific world and the cultural-spiritual mythos of a second life in the heavens? 

LOST could be described as an experiment on the universe - - - trying to unlock the gateway between life and death, Earth and Heaven, life and the afterlife. The Island is like the LHC, having its own unique properties which defied conventional physics. What would happen if you put human beings into a large particle accelerator device? Time would move differently, or even jump decades at a time? Would the light "bend" differently through the trees? Would you be able to teleport matter? Could you reach heaven before you died?

Those are the types questions LOST could have raised in the finale.

LOVECRAFTIAN

According to author H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos, somewhere sunken in the South Pacific there is a “nightmare corpse-city” called R’lyeh, “built in measureless eons behind history by the vast, loathsome shapes that seeped down from the dark stars.” 

In his house in this city, the great old god Cthulhu waits, dead and dreaming, for his return to power. In a story, a crew of sailors accidentally discover a risen part of the city, an island with a “coast-line of mingled mud, ooze, and weedy Cyclopean masonry,” accidentally wake Cthulhu from his sleep, and are either killed or driven mad.

 Exploring the island, the sailors soon discover that “all the rules of matter and perspective seemed upset,” and they struggle to comprehend and describe their surroundings. “One could not be sure that the sea and the ground were horizontal, hence the relative position of everything else seemed phantasmally variable,” one of the sailors, Gustaf Johansen, wrote in his log. Even when they discover a simple door, the sailors couldn’t tell if it “lay flat like a trap-door or slantwise like an outside cellar-door” because the “geometry of the place was all wrong.”

Of course, none of it—the sailors, the city, the island, the dead-dreaming god—are real. If it was, though, would science be able to explain the weird geometry of the city? Benjamin Tippett, a theoretical physicist and mathematician at the University of New Brunswick, tries to bring fiction into science with a “unified theory of Cthulhu.”

After poring over the clues and descriptions left by Lovecraft’s characters and employing his “mad general relativity skills,” Tippett thinks that the geometry of R’lyeh was all wrong—not because the architecture curves and angles in strange ways, but because of the space the city occupies. R’lyeh, he says, lies in a “region of anomalously curved spacetime,” and the bizarre geometry of the buildings and changing alignment of the horizon are the consequences of the “gravitational lensing of images therein.” 

In a region of curved spacetime, Tippett explains, light doesn’t travel in reliably straight trajectories, so objects beyond the curved region appear warped and skewed, and the relative positions of two objects, or the flatness of a large object, in the region are difficult to discern. A visitor to R’lyeh, he says, would “see the outside world (and other distant objects upon the island) as if through a large fishbowl. Thus, the horizon would no longer be reliably straight, and the sun and moon would swing wildly through the sky depending on one’s position.”

Tippett thinks his “spacetime bubble hypothesis” can also explain the oddities of how time is perceived in R’lyeh, and maybe even address the “central myth of the Cthulhu cult.” Time, he says, passes slower inside an area of curved spacetime than it does outside of it. This time dilation is probably what allowed the sailor Johansen to “survive adrift at sea for nearly two weeks … in a state of helpless dementia.” It could also mean that Cthulhu, whose cultists describe him as dead and dreaming, neither alive nor truly dead, is simply “in a position where it does not feel the passage of time.” At the center of the spacetime bubble, the god could wait, unchanging, for aeons.

As to what caused or created the curved spacetime bubble surrounding R’lyeh, Tippett can only guess. “An exotic type of matter with which human science is entirely unfamiliar is required for such a geometry to exist,” he says. “Indeed, this is the very species of energy which is theoretically required to build a warp drive or a cloaking device. Only a people capable of crossing vast cosmic distances could have constructed Johansen’s bubble.”

Bubble. Spacetime. Time dilation from inside and outside the island. Exotic type of matter.

These are all elements in LOST.

Was the hidden foundation of the LOST mythology from Lovecraft?

As said in Hollywood, nothing is really new.

Is the smoke monster a version of Cthulhu, a dead and dreaming god?

It is a possible explanation. It has tangential elements of exotic powers, unexplained monster, and a time drift that defies conventional science.

The smoke monster is nothing we had ever seen. It takes the form of smoke, then transforms matter into various forms, including humans. It has the ability to read minds, reshape memories, and absorb personalities. It some ways it is parasitic. In other ways, it is intellectually aware.

Or the smoke monster could be the island god's leaking subconscious, a semi-dream state creating or interacting with castaways which shipwreck on its shores, and in turn, disturbs its eternal slumber.

If one part of the island is in actual dream state, the human beings on its surface are the new threads in the island's fantasy world. The castaways don't know that they are real elements in a non-human's dream. And with dreams, they can turn into nightmares. Also, dreams can often overcome the dreamer's normal moral compass and governors, and turn quite dark. 

But this premise does not explain the ending to the series. If the smoke monster was part of the island god's dream state, how could it be "killed?"  Why would even want to be killed?  The only way to stop a dream is to wake up (another strong theme in the sideways world).  So it is possible, that shipwrecked islanders came under a dream like spell while on the island, interacting with the unseen consciousness of the Lovecraftian god. 

Two possible outcomes of killing or waking up a slumbering god: first, it is angry and kills everyone who is on the island, or second, it is benevolent and gives each person their own "dreams" in the alternative afterlife world. Except, not everyone was happy and content in the sideways world. And why keep the island events hidden, repressed and unknown in the sideways world? Was it a final test?

Or was it just another level of the dream?