All of this has happened before…

Buddhism the religion has some things in common with Battlestar Galactica, but without all the Cylons. 😋

First, space is really, really big:

It is also incredibly old.

In Indian religions in general, including Buddhism, frequently use a term kalpa meaning a great, vast eon. Such an eon is beyond measure, but similes are often used to explain the scale of a kalpa:

…a certain monk went to the Blessed One and, on arrival, having bowed down to him, sat to one side. As he was sitting there, the monk said to the Blessed One, “How long, lord, is an eon?”

….“Suppose there were a great mountain of rock—a league long, a league wide, a league high, uncracked, uncavitied, a single mass—and a man would come along once every hundred years and rub it once with a Kāsi cloth. More quickly would that great mountain of rock waste away and be consumed by that effort, but not the eon. That’s how long, monk, an eon is.

Excerpt from “A Mountain Pabbata Sutta”  (SN 15:5), translated by Ven. Thanissaro Bhikkhu

But then to drive the point home, the Buddha then says:

And of eons of such length, not just one eon has been wandered-through, not just one hundred eons have been wandered-through, not just one thousand eons have been wandered-through, not just one hundred-thousand eons have been wandered-through.

But, Buddhism, along with Indian cosmology in general, tends to see these eons and time itself as cyclical: eons rise and fall (traditionally in a great fire), and rise again.

Just like Battlestar Galactica: all of this has happened before, and will happen again.