Lying in bed at night, with my mind wandering over the landscapes of imagination, I'll often come across some hidden lush grotto or strange alien moonscape, a place I've never heard of before in my 22 years of constant learning. Places like "Ocean circulation driven by undersea hydrothermal vents" or "A point-of-view self-guided tour of Carleton via WorldWideWeb". I spend several hours wandering these wildernesses, exploring new ideas.
Invariably, within a few days, I mention one of these new ideas to someone, and they say "Oh, so-and-so did that a few years ago" or "Ah, yes, there are several good papers on that topic", and I suddenly discover that what seemed like a silent woodland has a freeway running through it, with subdivisions dotting the hillsides and a gang of Hell's Angels smoking dope in the clearing I'd found the day before.
I don't claim that there are no longer any new ideas: new areas are being explored all the time, but they're becoming increasingly remote and abstract, further removed from tangible reality. Original thinking is becoming less an act of exploration and discovery and more a process of artifical construction; one must build one's own forest out of tinfoil and sequins. Somehow, it just isn't the same.
This problem isn't limited to intellectual landscapes, of course: the physical environment is having the same problem: too many people seeking a chunk of "wilderness" to exploit. My solution to the problem of the destruction of intellectual wilderness is the same as that proposed by various government and environmental organizations: set up "knowledge preserves" and "idea parks".
Here's how it would work. A group sets aside a number of topics in a wide variety of academic disciplines as "knowledge preserves". For a small fee, visitors are given a small bit of introductory information on a topic as well as some useful apparatus for physical observations, if necessary. This serves as a "trailhead" for the park. Visitors are free to explore as widely as they choose, and may describe their explorations by word-of-mouth to friends, etc. However, no one is allowed to publish, patent, copyright, or extract profit from anything discovered in a knowledge preserve. An explorer may end up walking over a path previously traveled, but will never know it.
Naturally, the idea isn't perfect: it's subject to the usual economics of exploitation (slash-and-burn tactics, the tragedy of the commons, etc.), but with proper management, it could allow everyone to explore new intellectual terrain, not just those with billion-dollar supercolliders or twenty years of mathematical training.