I'm trying to wrap my head around how that would work, based on everything Desmond has done in the show. I mean, he already left the Island (and started off of the Island) so how does that flow correctly? Unless all of the Desmond off Island portions were in an alt reality.
Sometime in the future Desmond triggers an event that sends him back into the past. This event - whatever it is, probably something to do with how he was "unhinged" from time in the first place, the key (literally, button) "trigger" which was supposed to prevent the end of the world (in context, it would be him becoming unhinged from constraints of time/space and the escalation of events up to him becoming smokie and eventually getting off the island and turning everything to utter and true chaos) - would set him up as the chosen (he was already chosen, or is, or is being, damn my head hurts) guardian of the island with two possible paths.[holy run-on sentence, Batman!]
Now what I am wondering is whether the "magic box" (which is supposedly a metaphor, a McGuffin that creator JJ Abrams so loves) or heart of the Island is the eternal thing causing the event, or whether it was created as a function of the Island by someone else. Pretty much impossible to say.
At any rate, judging by Daniel FaraMore's equations, pretty much the "magic" of the Island/entity/entities is all tangled (like strings?
😱) with quantum theory. The mythology is all present there, but the pseudo/theoretical science is going to be near the top in terms of the explanation of what makes the Island tick. Time travel is a byproduct of this, and humans can wield some level of it, giving rise to all the other mystical mumbo-jumbo and EM observed by the Dharma initiative way back when. I.e. magic is really just the science we can't explain yet.
I had too much caffeine and not enough sleep, so this is where I leave off my random nonsense and theories that probably fail hard. Lol.
😀
And yes, everything is very chicken and egg. Time travel alone makes my head hurt, and I know very little of even layman's theoretical physics, which might prove useful in some respect in understanding some of this stuff.