Ever feel like you’ve been through all this before? Well, you’re not the only one. For millennium thinkers, philosophers, and spiritualists have put forward the notion that existence is just one big eternal loop. That was is exactly the same as what will be. While always a popular theme among eastern philosophies this belief gained notoriety in the western world when it was put forth by Fredrick Nietzsche. But we here at Mind Blown are not overly concerned with philosophical gobbledygook. You can wax poetic on your own time, we say. Show us the Science! (Or at least some pseudoscience we can laugh about).
Well, it turns out the idea of Eternal Return is not as new-age cycle of renewal and rebirth as it sounds. Many cosmologists have come to believe that when the universe as we know it does come to an end it will do so with a “Big Crunch”. The Big Crunch is essentially the opposite of the Big Bang. Instead of exploding outward the universe will succumb to its own gravity and collapse in upon itself (don’t worry, no one thinks this is going to happen anytime soon). These same scientists believe that in the moments following the Big Crunch there will be another Big Bang.
Think of it like one of those expanding and contracting balls kids play with. The ball gets big, expanding out to its farthest limits and then the ball is pushed back together, but then the ball expands again. An endless cycle of expansion and contraction. This may not be the first, fifth, or even five hundredth version of the universe. Where we live now could be the result of the eighth millionth “Big Bang”. Hell, maybe that’s what Douglas Adams meant when he said “42”.
Now here is where things get tricky. If quantum theory is correct and there are only a finite number of permutations that can be formed by all mater in the universe, then eventually in an infinite cycle of expansion and contraction the universe will repeat a previous configuration. So it may very well be possible, that completely by chance, a version of me in a previous iteration of the universe typed out this exact blog entry and a previous version of you read it at the exact same moment in the timeline of that universal iteration as you are now. How’s that for mind blowing?