There Can Be Only One! by Magnus Hanso

There can be only one... one timeline.

Daniel Faraday said that time is like a river. A big enough boulder can divert the stream temporarily into two streams, but it will eventually converge back into one stream because that is how the river of time flows. If the timeline is split, how can the two timelines seamlessly run back together without any inconsistency in the recent past? For the two timelines to converge and still include what happened in both timelines, wouldn’t that mean that there would be two of almost everyone in the universe – not just the people on the island? If the convergence of two similar timelines would not create two of each person, would two minds go into one body? Which body? What memories of the short term past would people with a different past in each timeline keep after a “seamless” convergence back to one timeline?

My theory is that there can be only one timeline. Multiple timelines create disorder in the universe, and these must always be reconciled if and when they occur. There may be some way for timelines to merge at some future point (but not without seams - some type of overwriting), or else one of the timelines is simply destroyed in some way so that there is only one.

The universe has some sort of built-in system that eliminates one of the timelines if some paradox creates an alternate timeline. The two timelines can't converge seamlessly, yet only one timeline is allowed to exist. There are rules, rules about which timeline lives on as the sole timeline after a split. The incident (whether the bomb went off or not) created a paradox that caused a divergence in the timeline, and this must be resolved. One way for it to be resolved is for one timeline to be destroyed. I'm not sure how exactly one of the timelines can be destroyed, but I'm guessing that this is where the Valenzetti equation comes into the picture. If neither timeline gets destroyed and course correction takes over and eventually merges the two timelines, one of them must be "overwritten" by the other to resolve the inconsistencies in the recent past. To most of the universe, the timelines are identical so there are really no stakes for them as to which one of th! em is destroyed... except to our Losties and most everyone else involved with the island in some way or another. Right now, and temporarily, there are two timelines. After the "war" is over there will be only one – and what happened in that timeline will be what happened.

I know it's pretty vague and I tried to leave the hardcore science out of it, but I thought I'd throw it out there for discussion. Feel free to rip me to shreds :).