>Main problem with this theory is that the creators of the wheel (and the Smokey summoning chamber) appear to have been the mysterious ancient Islanders with 4 toes. <

Yes, the central question is resolving as something like "How did such advanced technology end up hidden far in the past?"

I can currently think of only three plausible (by SciFi standards) explanations:
-Aliens visited long ago (a "Chariots of the Gods" scenario) and the island is the key to accessing and controlling their various remaining artifacts, or
-Aaron grows up to be way more brilliant than all the geniuses who have ever been, all rolled together, and invents the Dharma Wheel Device & the 'lil wormholes & Smokie & all this stuff himself, then hides it way back in the past before disaster overtakes him, or
-Aaron goes to or at least discorporeally views the future and then either builds an ancient civilization possessing advanced tech or instructs his high priest corporeally traveling into the distant past on his behalf (John Locke?) to build such an ancient civilization possessing advanced tech.
Or, I suppose, a fourth option would be a combination of Aaron monkeying with alien artifacts and setting up an ancient civilization.

Introducing aliens as an explain-all at this point in the LOST saga would be so facile and deus ex machina; I think more highly of the writers than that. My guess is it has nothing to do with aliens. More likely John Locke loses a toe and is memorialized in the Four-Toed Statue for a job well done as Jacob's high priest.

bundt asks:
>Are you even watching the show?<

Lindleof observes:
>Obviously, this person watches the show very closely.<

AlaskaSteven replies:
Sometimes, bundt, I begin to worry that either I may be misinterpreting your tone (it is all too easy for e-mail text to unintentionally read as curt, brusque, or harsh) or that you may perhaps be taking this LOST speculation fun a bit more seriously than usually fits together with the concept of “fun.” Assuming (as I am ever so wont to do) the intention is a friendly question rather than an outright attack, I’d just mildly offer:
-yes, I have moments of total dumbness at times (perhaps even frequently),
-the Orchid orientation film may contain disinformation and not be totally trustworthy gospel in all regards,
-this was a way to mention a potential mechanism explaining HOW a physical proximity between the anomaly and the Vault could have operated (via real-world induction effect),
-writing the comment thusly was also a way to work in a modest physics joke “which would seem an exotic matter,” and
-stylistically it sometimes seems preferable to me to state something about which I have long had a very clear and certain understanding as if I am only recently come to wonder about the point, this because doing so can invite others into a conversation (especially if they feel timid about interacting in a public forum with some occasionally ferocious-seeming writers) and because doing so can seem more socially pleasant and less know-it-all arrogant than making strong assertions.

That said, I really would be interested to hear what folks think: could it be plausible within a SciFi construct for the force field of the Wheel-and-Whatever-Is-Behind-The-Wall to actively extend all the way from, say, the arctic, through a wormhole?

My sense is that whether in SciFi or abstract physics the usual speculation is that a wormhole is not so much like a tunnel or pipe as like a point of singularity. Accordingly, can an effect or field generated on one side of such an event horizon extend continuously and actively through to the other side? Remember that the north pole of a bar magnet (or magnetic field) cannot be chopped off from the south pole -there is an illusion of the ends as being divisibly north and south (since they repel a like charge and attract a different charge on another magnet) but the N and S poles are one and the same as each other and cannot be separated one from the other.

; )