Changing the Past ("The Little Prince")

The Losties continue to traipse around through time - this week to mid-season 1 just after Boone's fatal injury and Aaron's birth, to an unknown time in the future with a trashed camp to 1988 when Rousseau's French expedition wrecked on the island.

Taking Daniel's assertion in mind that the past cannot be changed, that it's a street that one can go backwards and forwards on but not create new streets, let's explore the evidence one way or the other...

Here's my main argument - when anyone travels back in time, they can't help changing the past.  Every blade of grass they step on, every sip of water they drink, every molecule of air they breathe, has changed from the way they found it.  The way the world was before they traveled to the past.   Assuming the world once existed one way without the Losties occupying space at that moment then yes, they have changed the past.  In a cosmological, fundamental, universal sense of time and space a bee altering its path to fly around the head of a Lostie is just as significant as a nuclear explosion that didn't happen before.

Now, there are a couple of arguments to be made against that explanation.  The first is the explanation that all the changes already happened in the past, and were always there.  In other words, 2 years before Locke was even born, he visited the Others and interacted with Alpert.  When Jin was still a young boy of 14 helping his father fish in Korea, an older version of himself was always at that time floating in the water, injured and exposed.  Somehow, some way, in some manner of time and space, all the events the time-skipping Losties are interacting with already happened.  So the past isn't actually changing at all - there was never a "time" when that blade of grass wasn't stepped on. But then the question remains - if a person hasn't been born yet, how could they always have been in a place prior to, say, their birth?

The second argument relates to Desmond's warnings to Charlie that he was going to die.  Desmond tried, mightily, to prevent his vision from coming true - he built a lightning rod, etc, but Charlie eventually died just the same.  Desmond's vision came true, but because he knew about it and tried to prevent it, it just happened in a different way.  There are also other examples of characters mentioning that the universe has a way of "correcting" itself.  If something was meant to happen, and for some reason didn't, fate or time or God or whatever would simply find an alternate way of making it happen. This theory would allow for limited interaction with the past, but would still force major events to occur in some way.  It would dismiss that broken blade of glass as unimportant, but not allow Locke to, say, kill Alpert in 1954.  Or for him to kill Widmore.  Or if they did cause him a grevious injury, the island would "heal" it to allow his life to continue as it would have.  This would also explain why Sawyer couldn't seem to interact with Kate when she was delivering Claire's baby.  I personally think he just didn't want to interfere, but some people said he actually was unable to do anything.

So there are a couple of possible work-arounds to the whole "you can't change the past" baseline that seems to have been established.  Personally, I hope it turns out that they can change the past - which usually makes for better story-telling (a la "Back to the Future"). 

Right now the only real evidence we have to go on is Daniel's assertions. Ok, so he's a specialist in time and the physical properties of the universe, but that doesn't make him an expert! :)  I'm just saying he could be wrong.

Another thought I had regarding the time travel.  Consider all the sightings the Losties have had on the island of people or things they thought either dead, missing, imaginary, or somehow not supposed to be there.  Jack saw his dad, Christian Shepherd, walking around when his body was supposed to be in a coffin near the caves.  We saw Shepherd existing in Jacob's cabin several times as well.  Kate at one time saw a mysterious horse.  Hurley saw his "imaginary" friend Dave.  Mr. Eko saw his deceased brother Yemi.  And most perplexing, Shannon (and Sayid) saw a dripping wet, older Walt twice trying to warn her when at that time he was still being held by the Others.  And Locke saw Taller Walt appear to him after Ben had shot him and left him for dead.  What if some or all of these appearances were the characters also travelling back and forth in time to appear to our heroes and interact with them in some way?  In other words, some of them may not have been apparitions, ghosts, or manifestations of the Smoke Monster but honest to goodness time traveling?  Just as Sawyer could have broken into the clearing to disrupt the birth if he'd wanted to, so could Walt from some time in the future jump back and appear to Locke.

Just a thought.  I'd add more, but I just don't have the time...