I’m having hard time getting my head around the fact that there is no end to space. Is there really no end to space at all? How do we know?
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We don’t know. There are three possible shapes that space could make. The analogy to 2 dimensions are flat, curved away from itself (saddle shaped) or curved into itself. The first two have no end. The last would eventually connect with itself.
We can actually measure the curvature of space. And we’ve measured….no curvature. But our measurements aren’t perfect, so the universe could possibly be curved in on itself and we wouldn’t be able to detect it currently as long as it is larger than around 23 trillion light years in diameter (15 millions times the volume of the visible universe).
Edit: there is another possibility which is any random shape that isn’t uniform in every direction, like maybe a part of space is suddenly curved for hundreds of billions of light years then flattens out or curves back in the opposite direction. Or maybe space is shaped like a chess piece and we live on the flat bottom. But no evidence for that yet.
But as far as we know you could point a ship in any direction and travel forever. And the most likely thing you’d find is more of what we currently see…trillions and trillions of galaxies. Anything else (like a wall, or the end of a computer simulation) isn’t supported by science.
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