Just having some tea and contemplating the nature of reality…how possible is it that the earth is inside a field whereby all points of exit are blocked by insurmountable problems (ie stars, black holes or other stuff we can’t get through).
Obviously we have a sufficient sized playground which we will be busy exploring for quite some time, but nevertheless, is it possible that one day we could find that even though space itself is vast, our system is like an island, except the water is deadly?
I hope this post is coherent enough, please ask if anyone wants further elaboration.
Th’ way we’ve been carrying on the last few thousand years, I wouldn’t be surprised. You mean like Krikkit?
Hard to say. We probably won’t know until some future probe sends us back the message “Am about to hit gigantic wall in the space-time continuum. Any further instruc-?”
“After a longish war, the Planet Krikkit was sent into a dimensional pocket where they would remain until the end of the universe, at which point they would be freed to live as they chose” e2.com
Yeah I suppose something like that. My question was assuming our current understanding of real-world physics and problems like clusters of stars and what have you.
Any area of space 15 billion+ light years* away from us is completely unviewable from us. We can’t even look at it. Assuming near light speed travel, places half that distance when we have that tech could never be reached. Expansion of the Universe and all that. We are boxed in. It’s a big box (or sphere).
(Also, the clusters of galaxies are moving apart and will one day be too far apart for contact. It will then just be us and the local 20ish galaxies in our own group if we hadn’t developed high speed space travel by then.)
Right now the light years of space seems to be enough to effectively box us in from the rest of the universe.
To answer your question, no. Unless the box consisted of some sort of exotic material we can’t even theorize, such a construct would collapse in on itself due to its own weight.
We would have detected any kind of black holes or energy field that would keep us from leaving the solar system.
Phillip Jose Farmer’s “Behind the Walls of Terra” series also had a boxed in Earth, where the Earth’s universe basically “ended” a bit beyond the orbit of Pluto.
It has been considered by some. E.g., in one of Asimov’s science essays he discusses this. (Sorry if I can’t recall which one, after all, there are so many.) But one really big problem with this is the implied concept of the Universe having a boundary, which is widely rejected.
If a Black hole is large enough should we not be able to (as a solar system say) cross the event horizon a few million years in the past. while inside we should be able to see out from all of the infalling light. Yet anything on the “outside” would not be able to see us, yes?
If you’re asking why we don’t have visitors more often, I would suspect that our unpleasant tempers, raving paranoia, and access to nuclear weaponry might have something to do with it…
A closed Universe (one which ends in a Big Crunch) is essentially equivalent to the entire Universe being a black hole, so it’s not ridiculous to suggest that we might be in a black hole. But current evidence seems to be pretty firmly against a crunch.
You could also have a very large black hole inside of the Universe, but there are not believed to be any black holes large enough to let you survive inside for longer than a year or so.