It is a piece of paper. The human concept of a paper airplane doesn’t negate that paper exist.
That’s not an answer to the question I asked. There was a plane, now there is no plane. Where is the plane?
There’s a difference between using words to define something, “you get into a spaceship and keep going forever”, and actually conceptualising it. First of all, I only really need to imagine a big universe to be able to visualise it never ending no matter how far I go. That’s because I can’t really conceptualise keeping on going forever, I can only conceptualise going for a long time.
It doesn’t expand into anything.
The plane only exists in our human conception of what a plane is.
And I would argue that a folded up piece of paper that floats in the air for a few seconds is not a plane.
It also doesn’t expand into nothing - it just… expands.
How do you comprehend the nothing it expands into?
You’re just evading the question; the plane is real - it’s a plane - but it’s a temporary configuration of the paper. (if you must, then substitute it with a real jet plane made of metal - where does it go when it is scrapped and melted down?)
Just like you and I are a temporary configuration of matter; when the paper is unfolded flat, the plane doesn’t go somewhere - it is unmade. When we die, we are unmade. It doesn’t ‘go black’ - it doesn’t go
anything
Yes, so saying “there is nothing” outside of the universe can be misleading, because many people tend to think of “nothing” as emptiness waiting to be filled up with “something”, but it is not. There is no “outside of the universe”, at least in models where there is a single universe.
Asking the same question over and over again after it’s already been answered is considered poor form on this board. There are even names for that tactic.
There isn’t a “nothing it expands into”. It’s ok, it’s outside of human experience so anyone will struggle to truely conceptualise it seeing as there isn’t anything to conceptualise.
To be fair, it’s a hard concept to come to grips with.
True - these are some of those classic non-intuitive philosophical things that have been discussed and argued about forever.
Ok. I am sorry the existence of the infinite universe has been answered.
Great. An attempt to helpfully answer your questions is met by sarcastic snark. Plus the fact that you apparently missed the “not infinite” answer.
There are some phenomena, like gravity, that can appeal to intuition through rough and imperfect analogies. Others, like the isotropic nature of the expanding universe, can be partially analogized. Others still, like the Higgs boson, are analogized so poorly that it’s worse than useless.
But some cannot be analogized at all to appeal to intuition. They are mathematical models backed up by substantial physical evidence, but have no analog in our everyday experience. Demanding an everyday-experience explanation for cosmic phenomena that have no such analogy is extraordinarily simplistic and myopic.
I am simply asking if other people have a difficult time with the concepts of infinity or nothingness. I understand you don’t.
I think you get to a point where you do don’t bother trying to conceptualise some things because it is not possible to conceptualise them. Nothingness can’t be imagined because there is literally nothing to imagine. If you’ve imagined something then you’ve got it wrong. Some infinities are easier to conceptualise than others.
Since this is IMHO, and the question is just as philosophical as scientific, my answer is simple: We don’t know, we likely cannot know, and at some level it’s comforting. After all, maybe there is more out there than we have ever imagined. This is what I find fascinating as an agnostic - the hubris to be sure of anything in a world that may never be fully knowable.
This statement is unhelpful. Are we talking about ‘going black’ as a metaphor for the ending of our ego/id? Are we talking about some literal darkness at the end of the tunnel? Because saying ‘how do we know it’s black’ seems specific to a post-life experience.
Sticking with the first point - I again, find a complete cessation of, well, everything, for lack of a better word, hypothetically pleasant. Sure, I don’t want the world that is ‘myself’ to end, but since we are darn unlikely to have biological immortality in the 3 or so decades I have left, there is the point where I will absolutely want an end.
As for an afterlife, again, no way to know experimentally, and for that matter, we have countless theories, religious, and cults all competing for truth. I am not particularly fond of the Abrahamic and similar faiths where a deity gets to chose the consequences all merely by virtue of being first. So the egalitarian option that all entities start, exist, and end at some point seems fair enough to me.
I close with what I always return to when I -do- have doubts about the universe and life:
The OP has been consigned to the infinity of nothingness.
The language of mathematics is an essential and effective tool physicists use to comprehend the universe, philosophical difficulties notwithstanding.
Going black is a metaphor, take metaphors literally at your own risk.