There’s an interesting concept out there of all of humanity sharing a single soul. It’s much like the Single Electron Theory but in that we all have the same soul being reincarnated over and over, and unbound by time.
I don’t personally believe this, but it’s an interesting thought
There is a great book by Katie Mack called The End of Everything. She runs through all the top theories like this. It’s quite enjoyable.
One of the theories about the universe repeating has that ponderous nature that if this moment will be repeated forever any good thing you can do help someone will be repeated forever so if you have a choice to help or not you should think about that action being cemented forever. She doesn’t go into free will and such, there are many other theories.
This kind of thing happens even if you don’t assume time repeats. As far as we can measure, the universe is spacially infinite. Finite age, infinite spacial extent. If you ever hear someone talk about the diameter of the universe, they’re talking about the diameter of the observable universe - the part of the universe close enough for its light to actually reach us. But as far as we can measure (based on measurements of large scale spacial curvature), the universe is truly, literally infinite. It’s possible it curves back on itself with a radius much larger than the diameter of the visible universe. But if it truly is infinite, infinities make some very weird things possible.
For example, a diameter the size of the observable universe has a finite number of states. There are only so many atoms and so many ways to arrange those atoms. This number is unfathomably large, but it’s not infinite. But in an infinite universe, on a large enough distance, everything repeats. It doesn’t repeat in a regular pattern, but it does repeat. So get in a space ship and fly off into space. If you could go far enough, eventually you would run into an exact duplicate of yourself, with all the memories and life experiences you have - an atom-for-atom copy of yourself. Travel far enough and you’ll encounter a duplicate of our entire observable universe. And worse still, if the universe truly is infinite, there must be an infinite number of such copies.
I’m not talking about alternate realities or parallel universes here. I’m not talking about getting in a time machine and visiting an alternate timeline. I’m not talking about the quantum many worlds theory. I’m talking about the very space you inhabit, this universe. If you go out in a space ship and could travel arbitrarily far, it would eventually seem like you had come right back home, even though you’re quintillions of light years from where you were born.
Infinity is a terrifying thing.
Jesus christ eternal recurrence is terrifying…
I had a terrifying moment of being running away at age 6…
Do I have to do that… again? and again? and again?
Well tbf now I got an icebreaker?
Someone ask my life story?
LOL I will trauma dump on them
Its traumatic but trauma also makes my future wikipedia article (if I ever get famous) much more interesting to read… like my “Early Life” segment is gonna be insane…
I always liked the “one soul” theory. The concept is toyed with in the short story The Egg.
Basically reincarnation is real. Except if a soul can jump through space between lives, there’s no reason it can’t also jump through time. Space and time are one and the same.
Imagine if when you die, you wake up being born in another life. But that life could be anywhere in the past, present or future. Your consciousness doesn’t move linearly forward through time in a series of lifetimes arranged in a line. It bounces all over the place. 21st century US one lifetime, 8300 BC Peru the next, 12000 AD Alpha Centauri after that. And the whole chain of consciousness is a closed loop. Ultimately, there is just one soul, just one consciousness, bouncing back and forth across all of the history of creation. And when the soul’s path is complete, when it has lived every life there is to live? It loops back on itself.
You are a being of this universe. You are the consciousness of this universe. As am I. You and I are literally the same mind, separated perhaps by billions of lifetimes. Or perhaps I will live your life next, or you mine. Eternal life is real, but contained entirely within our finite universe. An endless loop of awareness echoing throughout all of creation. And we need to be kind to one another, as when I hurt you, I am literally hurting myself.
I don’t really think it’s something I personally believe, but it is a really cool concept that I love.
Sad to think about the universe in which I choked to death on mac and cheese in front of my four and a half year old niece and nephew
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One explanation would be that because “immoral you” doesn’t end up with the same universe as someone else who is also immortal.
Like, there is a universe where someone. survived 100 lightning strikes, but the odds of “you” being in those universes are very slim.
Like the odds of Person A surving 100 lightning strikes + Person B surviving 20 car crashes + Person C surviving getting shot 50 serpate incidents… and you also being in that universe, thats rare…
1 out of infinity is almost zero
There are universes without any life at all…
And like there is a universe that your great geandparents are alive because of some miracle anti aging cure found, but that universe might have a dead “you” so you never get to witness it.
Okay sorry I’m just rambling, hard to express in words
It’s only the conciseness that is immortal in this theory, so the fact the body dies does not immediately discount the idea.
There’s a really fascinating short film that I can’t find anywhere to watch anymore called Spin from 2004 that explores the idea that every moment for every conscious creature is a moment to behave in different ways constantly creating an infinite number of new universes.
Whats the closest?
Tbf I don’t know how much “actual” danger I was in. More about the “potential dangers”… like:
I was Guangzhou, China. Ran away from home after my older brother was chasing me around the house… i don’t remember what instigated it, allegedly I touched his toys? and he didn’t like it and got mad at me and wanna beat me… grandma was home and didn’t do shit since she’s old af, so I just… ran to the door, opened it, rans out the apartment, down the stairs, into the alleyway of my building (not really a “street”, not much cars or traffic, you’d have to walk like 10-20 minutes to get to the main road), and my building was next to 白云山 so I just went there up the mountain… instead of going to the main street…
IDK why I did that. I was 6 years old… decision making ability wasn’t the greatest…
I didn’t wanna be followed by grandma… I was angry… I wanna get away from home… so going though the path in the mountains with the twist and turns would lose anyone following… (I mean I remember the location so if you want I can show you in baidu maps)
Before that incident, I went to 白云山 often with parents… so that’s probably why I felt comfortable venturing there…
so… yeah… a 6 year old boy in around the late 2000s… all alone… crying… prime target for a would-be kidnapper…
I was told that kidnappings were a widespread thing that authorities didn’t/couldn’t do much about… mom later scolded me about it… I got so terrified after that incident…
so, anyways… then I took a path that exited the mountain near my school which was also right next to the mountain area, it was an off day, no school… I think I only went to that area because that’s the only exit from the mountain that I knew of… cuz sometimes my parent or grandma… whoever was watching me that day… would take me trough that shortcut by the mountain to school to save time from the “normal” path through the city area…
So I then went towards the main street 广州大道北 on the alternate alleyway… and ventured into the big city… I took a bus to my mom’s work place at her electronics store in a mall… bus driver didn’t give a shit, probably assumed I’m someone elses’s kid…
Got there, mom wasn’t at work…
So then I took the bus home… missed my stop cuz I fell asleep… like holy hell I fell asleep, someone could’ve grabbed me and claimed they were my parent and I doubt anyone would intervene…
So I walked back that 1 stop of distance back to the stop I was supposed to stop at and it felt like it was 30 minutes away… felt like an hour to me… then I saw mom with a bunch of cops and we got reunited…
Mom got alerted by grandma so she got off from work to report me missing… that why she wasn’t at work when I got there
I was gone for probably several hours… could’ve been kidnapped and possibly murdered for organs at any time. My mom told me about that young boys that would get organs harvested by traffickers and girls would get sex trafficked.
I still have trauma from that day… mom blamed me because technically I ran out of the house on my own free will, but it was my older brother who made the house felt unsafe in the first place… he’s 5 years older than me btw
But other than that would be the countless times where at any moment I could’ve accidentally fall in tracks in the US subways… or get hit by a car… but everyone is also just as “close to death” as I am so the millions of “averted accidents” aren’t that unique… but yea that one childhood running away incident is the most traumatizing one… the most unique to my upbringing…
God damn reliving that memory, I felt like my 6 year old self was so stupid, why the fuck did I run away, like if I died, my older brother would’d probably be celebrating to becoming the only child again… like he was originally supposed to anyways…
Probably on the list of “wow that’s new” if I go to therapy… yea I need therapy honestly but I feel like therapist are so fucking dismissive… even in the west where acceptance of mental health struggles is supposed to be “more accepting”
I was told that kidnappings were a widespread thing that authorities didn’t/couldn’t do much about
The vietnamese tell their kids the chinese will steal you, the chinese tell their kids the vietnamese will steal them.
IDK how safe China was 20 years ago, but children running around independently today isn’t uncommon. It’s not like Japan, but parents seem less helicoptery than America.
I’ve had a few motorbike accidents, including skidding into the opposite lane going around a blind corner after the morning rain deposited silt, that had dried, and a few clise calls like someone turning across my lane to go left, coming up on a blind corner and having to brake and get near the wall after hearing a bus honking from the other side, stalling my bike at an intersection as an incoming dump truck failed to slow down, etc. But like your “I could have fallen on the subway”, the situations weren’t dangerous with proper judgement.
