I just can’t fathom what’s on the other side of the universe, and would love if you guys could help!
In: Physics
There’s gonna be egg on all our faces when Voyager crashes into a gigantic matte painting of the outer universe.
It’s hard to use language to describe this.
Math is the best way.
Try not to think of seeing the universe from the outside.
In doing that, you’ve created more space to perceive the size of it.
Nothing. Not “nothing” like the vast emptiness of space. But actually nothing. A lack of existence. We cant comprehend “nothing”. We cant visualize it. Our brains didnt evolve to really understsnd this shit.
It’s not, it’s just infinite. There is no other possibility since “what’s beyond the end?” there can’t be nothing since nothing is still something. Us saying we know a damn thing about the universe is like a grain of sand that’s been in a bucket trying to tell you about sand on a beach thousands of miles away. We are a grain of sand. We can’t even fathom our own galaxy barely let alone a bajilliontyntrillionty miles further. It’s just limitless space. Again, that can’t be wrong because if the space ends what’s after that? How bout after that? It’s too mind boggling to comprehend.
Totally not a scientific answer, but I’ve always liked the idea the big bang was an infinite bomb set off in an intergalactic war, creating the universe we know which is expanding and devouring the old universe as it’s inhabitants watch the blast wave approach their galaxies in horror.
Isnt the real answer that literally no one knows?
The universe is all of the everything, but also all of the nothing. But ‘nothing’ is just what we call it where there isn’t any of the everything in that spot.
The everything is moving apart in all directions at once, which means that as time goes by, there’s more nothing in between the everything. There isn’t any more nothing than there was before – the everything is just further apart.
This is difficult for us to imagine because any explanation usually starts with “Imagine a [container].” By definition a container has edges. The nothing doesn’t.
The nothing is the place where things aren’t, just like darkness is the place where light isn’t, and silence is the place where sound isn’t. Just like you can’t be darker than darkness or more quiet than silence, you can’t be “outside” the nothing. To be “outside” the nothing would indicate a boundary, but to build a boundary you’d need some of the everything.
We don’t know yet if we’ve found the edge of where the everything is. It would be very hard to be sure, because the further into the nothing we look, the harder it is to spot any of the everything. But when we say things like “the universe is expanding” or “the universe might collapse one day”, we’re really talking about the everything. The nothing will still not be there whatever happens, because it’s always not been there. The nothing is just what we call it when there isn’t any of the everything in that spot.
One thing I was told, similar to the ballon metaphor, was this: Imagine an infinite ruler. Like the one with inch/cm markings. Just infinite long. And now expand this ruler. You clearly see the markings get farther and farther apart, the bigger the ruler gets. But it’s still “just” infinite.
The universe is already infinite. Just because it’s expanding doesn’t mean there can be something beyond this infinity
You sound like you’re picturing it expanding at the edges. Two things.
1) It’s expanding everywhere, not just at the edges.
2) There are no edges!
If space is infinite, that means our little human brains can’t really picture how it works at all. Can you picture something in your head that doesn’t have edges? Can you picture something that doesn’t have a middle?
Even the scientists getting PhD’s for doing the math on this stuff have trouble intuitively picturing what’s going on. Infinity is crazy!
How can something infinite, without edges or a middle, get bigger? It’s tough to follow. Pay extra attention in math class if you want to get paid to daydream about how cool stuff like this works!
Since most people here have already gotten across that space itself is expanding and not growing “outward” at an edge, here is another neat fact. Since the expansion can be quantified, about 72 km per second per megaparsec, that means if you go far enough there are actually places that are moving away from us FASTER than the speed of light. Some galaxies we can see are currently over this horizon. Say that we measure a galaxy right now to be 1 billion ly away. Well that’s where it was 1 billion years ago. It’s now MUCH further away because of this expansion. There are galaxies that we can see from earth but can never be reached even at light speed even if by some chance that galaxy is even still around. This is called being causally disconnected. Currently the Local Group of galaxies are the only places we could even dream of reaching assuming FTL travel is impossible. If you were to get in a modern day space craft and launch towards a galaxy outside the local group, you would never get there even in an infinite amount of time, because in the time it would take you to get there, billions and billions of light years of space would have expanded in between you and the final destination. So the expansion of space is ultimately limiting factor of where we can ever hope to travel.
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