It's been said that "This has all happened before, and it will happen again." That can be kind of a strange concept for some people because we'd like to believe that our lives are distinct and what we're doing isn't something that's been done before. The thing is though it's entirely possible that there is nothing new under the sun. If you think about it everything we do now is influenced by what we've done before. I'm not just talking about a single person, but the whole of humanity. It's next to impossible to escape the influence of not only our world's history, but our genetic history as well. If that's the case then could it be there are no more truly unique ideas left to be had?
Now don't get me wrong, I'm sure for the person who is out there right now dreaming up things the world has never seen before it must seem like no one else has had the same thought. There are close to seven billion people on the planet and each of us has a entirely exclusive view on the world. So while each of us experiences the world slightly differently than the person next to us, the law of large numbers implies that there is a small chance that somewhere out there someone may be thinking exactly what you're thinking right now. Granted that person may have already thought of it long before you were born or they could be a baby at this moment and will grow up to eventually have the same exact thought that's going through your mind at this moment. If that's possible for one person and a single thought, then wouldn't that mean every thought or idea can also fall under the same concept? Is everything we do, say, or think just a derivative of what's already happened before?
Do you remember the first time you fell in love? Maybe you had heard about it before or even seen it with people around you, but it wasn't until you experienced for yourself did the notion really take hold. Depending on your age it could have felt like not only were you experiencing it for the first time, but no one else in the history of the world felt what you were feeling at the time. The thing is though, people were falling in and out of love for thousands of years before you caught up to it. At the time it was the first moment you ever felt anything like it and for some of us every relationship is just a variation on that initial feeling. Even our idea of love is guided by how we felt the first time. If that's the case then can love be a new feeling or just a recap of our first experience?
There is an old myth about a patent office commissioner, who on the eve of 1899 becoming 1900 said that everything that could be invented had already been invented. That there was nothing left to discover or create. Humanity had reached its apex. It's an old story told usually to prove that no matter how far we think we've come, there is still more to discover. I don't disagree that a hundred years from now people will see and experience things we couldn't even dream of. The people a century from now may look at those wonders and take them for granted, in very much the same way we regard email or traveling thousands of miles in a matter of hours. Those things are commonplace to us now, but there was a time when they were only dreams. Still an email is just a message from one to another. The means of delivery have changed, but not much else. Those boys were the first to have controlled and powered flight and flew over a hundred feet. Within ten years airplanes were delivering packages. Within twenty years there were commercial flights for those willing to pay. The Wright Brothers are given the credit for being the first and many took their ideas and went to the next step. Still the Wright Brothers weren't the first to conceive of the idea of human flight. That had been dreamed up long before they got around to their tests.
There is an idea about the universe known as eternal return. The general idea is that the universe is made up of a finite amount of matter. The matter has a limit, but time itself is unlimited. From this the universe has no starting or ending state, because the matter that makes up the universe is constantly changing its state. Since the number of possible changes is also finite, eventually the same state will recur. This really all means that time is not linear, but it's more cyclical. All that is a complex way of saying that the universe is in a constant state of recurrence. What has happened will happen again given enough time. The whole thing can call into question the idea of free will. If everything has already happened or been done before by someone else under similar circumstances then are our choices really our own or just a matter of eventuality? Then again maybe it doesn't matter if it's all been done before and will all be done again afterwards. For us, at this moment now, it's new and unique. Maybe that's the only thing that matters.
