Seeds are powerful things, harnessing very dense information. They are like the designs of Nature, distributed everywhere in a dormant state. Human ideas are the same, those seeds can lie dormant for years, but they do keep popping up every now and then, when interesting drops of information water them to grow.
And the fact that ideas are a distributed concept means that even secrets ultimately will be revealed. The only way to keep a secret is not to tell anyone, and even then you run the risk of someone coming across the idea without actually being told.