How Many Iterations Was That?
Not sure how this impacts the story but there is a problem …
In the 2nd episode Sayid is able to pick up Danielle’s distress call which has been running on a loop (or in iterations). There were 7,294,531 iterations. Sayid does the math and says that the recording plays for about 30 seconds - that translates to 16 years and 5 months. Here is the transcript
The problem is Sayid’s math and stopwatch are both wrong. At 30 seconds there would actually be 17.6 years that have passed. However, the bigger issue is that the recording was not 30 seconds long. I counted 20 seconds. That would put Danielle on the island for 11.7 years. Also, we are assuming the counter started at 0. I don’t know anything about distress calls but I do know that in databases, model numbers, series numbers, etc you often don’t start with the number 0. If the counter started at 1million (as an example) then Danielle was only on the island for a little over 10 years.
Anyway, the point is that our time estimate for Danielle is off - by about 5 years at least. Did Sayid make the mistake? Did the writers? Or, is it really important to know that it hasn’t been 16 years? Only time will tell.
