Ok, I’ve been pondering this for months…
We all assume that the Earth exists within outer space (The Universe). And that The Universe is ever
expanding.
My question (in three wordings) is:
What is the universe expanding into?
What lies beyond the boundaries of the universe?
Within what does the universe exist?
Everything has some form of existence, everything has some form of environment it is within, what it
belongs to.
So what’s the deal?
Peter Eric Bruner
Who knows? My guess: foam peanuts.
Overflow parking for the Restaurant at the End of the Universe.
I don’t think any of us will run up on it and point at it, saying “What the hell is that???”
Somewhere in the early months there was a thread about “is there such a thing as infinity?” Maybe there isn’t.
I dunno?.. SPACE?! That seems reasonable. Isn’t that what ‘space’ is?.. The area that no matter occupies? Maybe I’m simplifying it too much, but then again, how can anybody know? =)
I don’t believe in God, but I’m afraid of him…
I imagine something I call the metaverse, the framework within which universes spring into being via big bangs.
But then of course revtim’s statement begs the question…" what is beyond the metaverse?" Wait I am starting to get dizzy…
Go out there and get some of it and bring it back for analysis, we’ll figure out what it is, eventually.
Hope that answers your question bruschu. All those months of pondering have finally paid off.
Try to think of something else to worry about.
P.S.: I would have said a super-giant mirror myself. Shows you how much I know…
Non-universe space.
Nothing.
God.
Peace.
Says who? Maybe the universe is the whole enchellada. For Ned Wright’s take on it:
http://www.astro.ucla.edu/~wright/cosmology_faq.html#XIN
Anyway, nothing outside your light-cone can be known by, have any effect on, or be affected by you, so one way to look at it is, “what difference does it make?”. You’re not causally connected to it, so you might as well make up a pleasing answer and go with that. It’ll be as good as any other answer.
–
peas on earth
The universe is the first matter created in the big bang… the first star that formed… at a point where the farthest most matter from the big bang is moving away is the edge of the universe… where it is moving into? it is moving into nothing… it is starting to fill a void of nothingness.
I dunno, I like my answer better!! Very simple!
Well, what we have here is really an infinite set of Russian dolls.
I could be wrong, because they only told me it was “turtles all the way down”; they never told me what it was up.
Ray (over the edge)
I forgot to mention, I imagine the multiverse framework (which is made out of literally nothing, not even space-time) to go on forever.
Some scientists theorize our universe in just a virtual particle springing into existence from the vacuum and just as quickly disappearing although from a human perspective it will take billions of years. If other bubble universes exist we would be living in a “multiverse”.
I personally like the idea of “something else”. “Nothing” has always been so hard for me to grasp. I remember a kid’s movie and few years back (I don’t remember the title) where “the nothing” was taking over. I had a lot more trouble with that concept than the Luck Dragon
That was “The Never Ending Story.” Great flick. But the answer to the original question is, the question has no valid meaning. The definition of the universe is everything that we can perceive. If we can perceive it, it’s in the universe. Therefore, there is no perceivable matter/void/anything which could possibly exist outside the universe. Weird, I know, but it’s one of those things (like the universe being a 4-dimensional “hypersphere”) that is tough to conceive but just has to be believed (by us laypersons, that is. SOMEONE has to know why all this is, or else physics turns into religion…).
Will someone please remind me to look at the news before I post? Turns out the universe ISN’T a hypersphere, it’s flat. At least this shows, yet again, why science is better than religion: scientists can be proven wrong and accept that fact!