• Question: if space is infinite will we ever search all of it?

    Asked by idontlikemycat on 13 Jan 2020.
    • Photo: James Bentham

      James Bentham answered on 13 Jan 2020:

      If it’s infinitely large, I don’t think we could explore all of it because it would go on forever. I read a physics book fairly recently that said that space could be infinite, or it might be finite and doughnut shaped.

    • Photo: Andrew Harrison

      Andrew Harrison answered on 13 Jan 2020:

      Even if space is finite, the fact the the speed of light is finite and a limit on how fast we can means there will be bits of space that we will never be able to visit.

      One of the current inflation theories of cosmology implies that space itself expanded faster than the speed of light. If this theory is correct, the visible universe, which we can see, is not the whole of space and the bits we can’t see we will never be able to visit. None of which precludes space being finite, rather than infinite.

      It’s rather humbling how small this can make us feel.

    • Photo: Christina Pagel

      Christina Pagel answered on 15 Jan 2020:

      Space isn’t infinite… but it’s big enough that we would never be able to explore all of it. or even all of our galaxy (which is just one of hundreds of billions of galaxies).

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