Is space infinite?

a reply to: SentientCentenarian

Hey, I'm still trying to recover from the time decades ago when it was announced that those 'smudgy stars' we thought were just a long ways away and therefore out of focus on telescopes of the day were actually freekin' GALAXIES - BILLIONS OF THEM. My concept of reality increased in size by orders of magnitude in that second.

Have another boost. What if the smudges we call Quasars are whole other Universes, farrr away...

I hear there's a nice restaurant at the end of the universe.

a reply to: imsoconfused

My pocket replied and submitted a blank - my pocket can do amazing things with my phone. I haven't even read beyond the 3 replies above me yet, but I'm liking what I'm seeing, and just wanted to edit so as not to have an unexplained blank reply. Flagged and onto the rest of the thread!

If space is infinitely outward... is it infinitely inward was well?

No matter how far our most powerful telescopes can see, we always find something. Similarly, no matter how close our most powerful microscopes can see, we always find something.

Such a mind #.

originally posted by: imsoconfused
When I was a kid my dad use to say space was never ending, infinite. He would ask how could it end and say if you were flying through space and came to a big wall with a sign saying this is end of space, what is on the other side?

More space.

When you are a kid infinite is a hard number to wrap your head around. If space is infinite then stars and planets and LIFE is infinite right?

I mean if you have a one in a quadrillion chance of intelligent life evolving on a planet you would still have an infinite number of quadrillions and an infinite number of the one that has life.

It seems there would be a 100% chance of another planet with intelligent life, we just have not discovered it.

So does space have an end or even a beginning? And if it does have an end what is on the other side?

Big, but finite. Has to be.

As to what's outside it, I don't know. I suspect you can't get there from here.

originally posted by: Terminal1
To me, if space and time were created at the moment of the Big Bang and the universe is still expanding then it has to have an end or border.

Of course I am no cosmologist but I just feel the Big Bang theory is somewhat incorrect.

You are correct. Forget big bang. Its just a convenient way of stating that we don't know jack really.

a reply to: imsoconfused

*speculative*
Maybe space-time is circular, its just that we cant see that its curved. In which case, if one kept going forward, one would end up where one started, in like 50 billion light years or something. Think of an expanding hypersphere, and thats kind of how I envision this universe.

When looking at the galactic Super Clusters in relation to the size of other heavenly bodies(not talking about girls this time), makes me believe there are even bigger constructs in existence, that in turn makes me belive personally that space is infinite that includes the multiverse theory, although not sure where on this theoretical scale i would put it.

I watched a good doco on this a few months ago. Some astronomers and physicists did an experiment which was quite complicated to see if there was a curve suggesting a sphere of a finite universe. I don't fully understand it but anyway the results they got they interpreted as suggesting the universe is infinite. Like quantum physics a lot of it is hard to comprehend for our limited brains lol.

Edit: Also the universe is expanding at an increasing rate which suggests if this continues it will keep expanding forever for an infinite amount of time...

a reply to: imsoconfused

I like this type of thinking and discussion. The truth we have no idea factually when there was a beginning or if the universe ends somewhere, IMHO. Oh yes, I understand there is the common belief that the universe came into being with 'the big bang' about 13.6 Billion years ago. But there are holes in that argument and it is not an unanimous belief.

Planets, stars and lives die. We know this.

We have no idea where the center of the universe is!! We can only see the faintest star that our latest telescopes allow us to see. We have no idea. That could be less than 1% of the universe.

Indeed, if the Universe does have an edge, wall, or someone unknown hole or void, what is that? and where did that come from.

Wonderful things to ponder about. Cheers