![]() ![]() ![]() This was not necessarily a cause for celebration. Nietzsche, who oscillated between grandiosity and deep depression, prided himself on the ‘discovery’ that he, and everyone else in the world, would relive their lives, again and again, in perpetuity. He called this ‘eternal recurrence’, also known as ‘eternal return’. While Blanqui imagined human history replicating itself in space, the 19th-century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche envisioned repetition over time. Does the Universe repeat itself in space or time? Or are we barrelling endlessly forward, never to repeat this moment or arrangement of matter, never to retrace our steps? Yet it reflects an age-old conundrum that continues to baffle physicists and cosmologists to this day. But Blanqui held out hope that, through chance mutations, those who are unjustly jailed down here on Earth might there walk free.īlanqui’s vision of replica worlds might seem fanciful – wishful thinking born of a prolonged confinement, perhaps. Might certain souls be imprisoned on these faraway worlds, too? Perhaps. While life on Earth is fleeting, he wrote in Eternity by the Stars (1872), we might take solace in the notion that myriad replicas of our planet are brimming with similar creatures – that all events, he said, ‘that have taken place or that are yet to take place on our globe, before it dies, take place in exactly the same way on its billions of duplicates’. As Blanqui looked up at the night sky, he found comfort in the possibility of other worlds. He had been locked up for his role in the socialist movement that would lead to the Paris Commune of 1871. Imprisoned in the fortress of Taureau, a tiny thumb of rock off the windswept coast of Brittany, the French revolutionary Louis-Auguste Blanqui gazed toward the stars.
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