Headscratchers / Time Trap

• Based upon the math on the timeline page, the conquistadors had only 8 minutes to explore the cave before the main cast enter. The Hopper family only 47 seconds. Not even factoring in the slower passage of time in the deepest center of the cave. Once the protagonists enter the rate equalizes, and they have another hour, maybe? Meaning that the oldest caveman in the cave had 5 hours, tops, to explore a cave with only torchlight.
  • Some watchers have estimated the equivalence from what's seen on the screen as closer to 4 seconds per year rather than 1 second, which would increase the times to 32 minutes, 3 minutes 8 seconds, and 20 hours. It is possible that different entrances have different time dillations, however.
• How exactly did the future human know where to go or what he was looking for to the degree that he apparently did? There are numerous openings to the cave but they drop a ladder at the one nearest the pool of water, walk in the correct direction of the water in spite of there being multiple paths out of the room they enter and move to take the sample, all without any hesitation or indication that they might be even remotely unsure about any aspect of this process. We know nobody else from their time entered the cave before and we know they didn't even send a drone or something similar first, so how did they gather this information and why were they so confident in their actions? Even if they somehow deduced the nature of the cave from outside you'd expect them to have to do at least a cursory amount of exploration to find what they are looking for down there.
  • They probably had something like tricorders and scanners, which allowed them to scan for life signs and temporal distortions without the need to send in a scout or drone.
• How did the future humans know the main characters would be there? Even if they somehow discovered the location and nature of the fountain, they'd have no reason to connect that with a random missing persons case centuries earlier, especially since the main characters didn't tell anyone where they were going.
  • They didn't. The future human's wrist gadget scans their faces and produces the missing person report afterwards. He is apparently connected to a database where (possibly) all human media even centuries past is stored and can be checked automatically.
• If the time dilation was a defense mechanism to protect the fountain, why was the super-slow zone located well away from the fountain?
  • It wasn't. The actual fountain is in the heart of the super-slow zone. There are other pools of residual water where some of the fountain leaks out to areas of the cave higher up. It's one of these pools where the future human gathers the healing waters from, not from the main fountain/waterfall.