Then thats what Im going with.

When they time travel, it automatically sends back something (I cant grasp how it figured out what to send back)... but it has to swap (Ben for a polar bear or bear for a horse), etc.... to keep the balance.

You def could be onto something. The balance of the Island

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SAWYER: Hey, when I asked you what you wanted for stakes -- why didn't you ask for the guns?
JACK: When I need the guns, I'll get the guns.

I think Ben in dessert just showed us what we suspected with Juliet in Portland (and possibly Frank Lapidus in Burmuda), that being the "vile vortices" are one way of going between the island and the real world.

Attached Images

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except that the listening station is in antarctica, and polar bears don't live there

But then why wouldn't it swap them to opposite places, and opposite times? Ben went forward to the near future. The polar bear went so far back it was becoming a fossil when Charlotte found it buried in the desert. If it's a swap, the polar bear on the island would have come from Ben's leaving the island and going to Tunisia, no?

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"Helen, do you remember that authentic Australian walkabout I told you about?"

Could you tell us more about the "vile vortices"? I have never heard of them before.

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" We kinda like knew that forever ago." -Hurley SE4EP8

I thought maybe Ben had originally gone to the listening station before he went to Antarctica, and that's why he was wearing a parka in Tunisia. Which also leads me to believe that it can't be, like someone said, a time travel one-way ticket.

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"Helen, do you remember that authentic Australian walkabout I told you about?"

Nononon.... Im saying... there are polar bears on the island. Thats a given. (or there were). What if the polar bear got to Tunisia as part of an experiment? Like, they put the polar bear in the "transferring machine" (whatever it is), to see what would come back if they sent it to tunisia.

it's not just a transferring machine tho

the pearl video showed the exact same rabbit showing up in a different spot and they freaked out about having the 2 possibly touch

I'm down with that. Makes sense to me.

Though, why pick a polar bear for a time travel experiement? Why not hte classic lab rat? Or some creature that is native to Tunisia--the hamser, maybe? And why choose a polar bear EXPECIALLY if the time travel experiment is secret and you're sending it to an environment where it would stick out like a sore thumb? Maybe DHARMA intended to send it to the Listening Station, but it went to Tunisia by mistake because they didn't know how to control time travel then? Maybe word didn't get out because the polar bear was sent to a time in Tunisia so early that a polar bear magically showing up would have been thought of as an act of god?

Wait, did the polar bear that Charlotte excavated still have fur? Or was it just bones and a collar? I'm trying to get a feel for how long the body had been sitting there in Tunisia.

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"Helen, do you remember that authentic Australian walkabout I told you about?"