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Push the button

During the second season of Lost, it was revealed that the Numbers must be entered into the computer located inside the Swan, previously known as the Hatch. A 108-minute countdown timer is attached to an alarm that is triggered by the timer reaching the 4 minute mark. When the alarm sounds, the person manning the computer has until the timer reaches 0 to enter the Numbers and push the execute button. Pushing the button resets the timer to 108 minutes. Although, If the button is not to be pushed, the Countdown Timer will turn to red and black hieroglyphs and the speaker will repeat "system failure" over and over again.

The first two Flight 815 survivors to learn about the button were Jack and Locke. Desmond, who was left to man the station alone after accidentally killing Kelvin, disclosed the bare facts and pointed them to the Orientation film. He fled the Hatch when he thought the computer had been destroyed, leaving Jack and Locke to repair the computer and decide how to proceed with the button pushing.

In "Man of Science, Man of Faith", a vision of Walt appeared to Shannon and spoke backwards "Don't push the button. Button bad". The meaning of his message was not clear at the time, as the consequences of failing to push the button had only been vaguely implied to be catastrophic by Desmond and the Orientation film.

Bunker hieroglyphs

In "One of Them", Locke witnessed the timer reach 0, at which time a loud hydro-mechanical sound was heard and the timer flipped to a series of glyphs. Locke discovered that it was still possible to finish typing in the Numbers and press execute during the flipping into these glyphs, at which time the counter returned to 108 minutes.

It is conceivable that this event happened again (off-camera) during "Lockdown" while Locke was trapped under the blast door in the other room. Ben (then still known as Henry Gale) alleged that he did not press the button, and describing the resulting events accurately, he professed that nothing else happened except that the timer reset on its own. However, this is obviously a lie as we now know the consequences of not pushing the button.

The survivors make an effort to take shifts so that there are always two people in the Swan to operate the computer; Locke seemed to spend more time pushing the button than any of the others. In "?", however, Locke is apparently frayed around the edges, and reveals that he has lost faith in the process. Locke's despondency is intensified by his and Mr. Eko's visit to The Pearl, and as a result, Locke considers it all a meaningless experiment and gives the duty up to Mr. Eko. During that same visit to the Pearl station, they learned that the button presses are logged. Locke prints out a log that began on, or a short time before, 4 April 2002.

The Season 2 finale revealed that the button serves as a discharge mechanism for an electromagnetic anomaly located within the sealed portion of The Swan. The incident, according to Kelvin, was a containment leak which caused a "charge" to build up over time. After 108 minutes, the charge buildup reaches a point where the magnetic field generated behind the concrete begins to have effects within the Swan. The magnetic field will continue to grow and it is implied that if the reaction is not stopped, it could destroy the Earth or at least all life on Earth.

Desmond failed to push the button on-time on September 22, 2004, triggering a system failure. Although the sequence was entered shortly after the time expired, the resulting magnetic burst caused Flight 815 to crash.

After Locke destroyed the computer monitor in "Live Together, Die Alone", the timer once again expired without the button being pressed. Although the system failure event was terminated by Desmond's use of the fail-safe key, the resulting "event" (termed the discharge) from the use of the key was felt by the entire island, and resulted in the destruction of the Swan station, as well as an electromagentic pulse that caused the failure of the satellite dish at the Flame and the sonar beacon system off the coast of the Island. The "event" was also large enough to be detected at a listening station in Antarctica.

In Access: Granted, a special feature on the Lost: The Complete Third Season (DVD) Blu-ray edition, the reason for the numbers needing to be entered by humans and not by an automated process is explained:

Damon Lindelof: I think the idea of sort of trusting the machine, what if the power goes out, or what if the station gets taken over by the hostiles? You know, it absolutely had to be manned by human beings.

Other observations

• 108 corresponds to the sum of the Numbers. 4+8+15+16+23+42=108
• There is a short story by Richard Matheson (later turned into a 1980s Twilight Zone episode) called "Button, Button". It deals with a couple that is given the option of pushing a button or not--with a surprising ending.
• A possibility could be that if this magnetic field builds up too much, it could neutralise Earth's magnetic field and let cosmic radiations pass the atmosphere, and as a result the death of all living beings would occur.
• The act of Pushing the button is an example of Pascal's Wager, a philosophical argument for belief in God. You are told that the world will end if you don't press the button. It costs you nothing to push the button so rationally you should press it. If you were told the truth, you save the world, if not you have not lost anything.
• You can only push the button for 4 minutes, and as Desmond told Locke, it was to save the world. The Madonna song, "4 minutes", has a lyric that says, "We've got 4 minutes to save the world", which is oddly similar to the situation.
• Pressing the button bears some resemblance to an episode of the new Outer Limits called "Dead Man's Switch" which deals with a group of humans who are locked in underground bunkers. The humans must press a button to prevent aliens from taking over the Earth but would allow the earth to be destroyed if they were dead.
• The movie Sphere (based on the Michael Crichton novel of the same name) has a button that must be pushed every 12 hours. "Everything in the habitat is videoed, so every twelve hours we take the video storage out to the mini-sub and press the reset button. The idea is, if something happens to us and we don't reset it, the sub goes to the surface automatically, so if we're all dead, they at least have a partial record of what went wrong." There are also connections between the alien, time-traveling sphere in the story and Lost's Magic box.

Unanswered questions

For fan theories about these unanswered questions, see: Push the button/Theories

• Why would Ben want to convince Locke that pushing the button was of no importance?

See also

• 108
• Countdown Timer
• Electromagnetism
• Enterthecode.com
• Enterthehatch.com
• Log printout
• The Numbers
• Swan computer
• System failure
• Swan Orientation Film
• Widget
• Webcyte.co.uk - Push The Button