Wayne, so you think Ben’s comments to his dad might reflect a butterfly effect from the lack of a 1954 appearance by the six?

Not necessarily, but it’s possible. I put that out as one example of the many possibilities that all the jumping around in time (or lack thereof) could create. But it’s also possible that what we’re seeing in the LA-X reality stems from something not directly or at all related to time travel. In any case, I think you’re right that LA-X is not the result of 1974-1977 time-traveler activities.

Maybe both Satan and Yahweh die in the end, a metaphor for the death of religion. Our heroes in the end are the humans not the gods, Lost-as-humanism.

Wayne, so you think Ben’s comments to his dad might reflect a butterfly effect from the lack of a 1954 appearance by the six?

If Oceanic never crashed, then Locke would not have time traveled ever, so what we saw in 1954 didn’t happen, nor the do-over time 1974-77.

This is an interesting point. Given that there was a great deal more time travel than just ending up in 1974, there are numerous possibilities for alternate timelines. From what we’ve seen, there were brief (and seemingly inconsequential) landings in a number of times, some possibly very far in the past. The 1954 time travel, though, involved significant interaction. It’s entirely possible (not that I think it’s what we’re actually seeing in LA-X) that we’re seeing a timeline that diverged at 1954, not 1977.

It’s all very messy, since we’re not talking about known or real phenomenon. We don’t whether the time travel we’ve seen allowed for bouncing between alternate timelines, or if travel forward is restricted to the timeline created by your last entry into the past. In other words, once you’ve gone into the past and changed something, can you go back to some future point in the timeline you came from, or are you stuck with the new trajectory?

What you can’t say (according to me) is that, because you went into the past and prevented the plane from going down, you weren’t in that past, since you only ended up in that past because the plane went down (in the relative future, mind you – tensing is difficult with time travel). You create another timeline each time you go into the past and change something. That timeline diverges from the timeline you came from at the first point at which you’ve made something different occur. But whether that new, alternate future involves your going back in time or not, what you did in the new timeline will always be there. A new future lacking time travel cannot affect the (revised) past, even if that past was the result of time travel from a different (i.e. previous revision) future.

(I swear I’m not posting from an asylum.)