The Edge of Forever
The Edge of Forever
No, this is not a Star Trek episode. It has to do with finding the edge of the universe.
I've discussed this before but I don't think anyone realizes how wild this concept is. The actual universe is much larger than we think. It's beyond comprehension. Humanity has gone from the idea that the world (basically our planet Earth) was the entire cosmos to the fact that the size of the cosmos is unattainable.
All of this is because of the inflation period since the Big Bang. This inflation period only took a millionth of billionth of a second for the universe to expand from a tiny atom size to a cosmological size at much faster than the speed of light. The inflation theory is the only way to explain how the universe has gotten so large, and more importantly, so uniform.
This is not to say that the universe is completely homogeneous. In fact, the inflation that happened after the Big Bang produced gravity waves that helped clump hydrogen gas together to enable the formation of the original stars.
Currently, the Big Bang is believed to have occurred 13.8 billion years ago. However, we can see that the universe has expanded to 46 billion light years in whatever direction we look. And, what're really nuts is that if we went out to a distant galaxy billions of light years away, we would make the same observation. This suggests that the universe is nearly infinite. In fact you could think of it this way. The observable universe is to the actual universe as an atom is to the known universe. The estimate is that the actual universe is around 10 to the 24th power larger than the known universe. That's crazy! This would mean that if you decided to travel to the edge of the universe at the speed of light, you would never get there even if you could live for trillions of years. Part of the reason for this is that the universe is expanding, and if you go far enough it's expanding at the speed of light. That's equivalent to someone moving the finish line of a marathon faster than the fastest runner. The race would never finish.
All of this is the reason that astronomers talk about the observable universe because the edge of the actual universe is unattainable.
What's really interesting about this is that we may actually be one of an infinite number of universes in a mega-universe. And this would make trying to understand our place in the scheme of creation impossible. One thing is for sure and that is that we are a tiny insignificant spec in a vast cosmos with a scale that we are still trying to understand.
Thanks for reading.
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