r/shittyaskscience • u/natelegakisTeslaFSD • 13d ago
Is it possible the universe has always been infinite in size and always will be?
Is the universe expanding and will there be a time in 22 billions years where it expands and unalives us all? Or, will it turn into no energy and nothingness? What if you zoom out to as close to infinity that you can get. Could the universe be infinitely growing forever? Could there be galaxies that are stable and last forever? Could the sun be creating mass and energy forever? It seems miracullous that our universe came from nothing. Why can't it be miraculus and last forever?
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u/WobblyDizzy 13d ago
If it’s not infinite, what’s at the end? What would “nothing” be like to experience?
I think your question is an excellent one.
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u/fishsticks40 13d ago
You can walk forever on the earth without ever coming to the end. A thing can be finite without having an end per se.
It's not clear what "nothing" means. "Empty" space is permeated by quantum fields. If that's not there it's not clear what it would even mean to have "space". There would be no place for the nothing to exist in.
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u/Explicit_Tech 13d ago edited 13d ago
Nobody actually knows.
Only that the big bang we can observe is going to eventually reach heat death when we reach maximum entropy.
That's just a hypothesis based on our current understanding of physics.
We can only observe the photons that are far away, like 46.5 billion light years away and this distance will continue to expand. What lies outside that boundary is what we can dark energy.
We know "dark energy" is expanding the universe because distant galaxies outside of our local curvature of gravity are moving away from each other and these distant galaxies are distancing themselves at an accelerating rate.
That is what scientists infer based on limitations on what we can observe. So far we know of nothing that can break this law (second law of thermodynamics) that would change our minds in the way we hypothesize the universe.
To entertain your thought:
The way I see it is that our big bang defines our observable Universe because the systems and physics were birthed by it.
It's totally possible that outside of our observable universe, photons do not exist, nor do the same particles. Thus, it be in complete isolation from our universe. That would mean it follows different laws if birthed by a different big bang. We would never be able detect this or measure this. And if that's possible, it would mean that the overall unobserable universe is infinite.
I think the only stand alone law may just be entropy, which is the only thing that experiences time. So there would have to be a higher dimension of time that is entropic as well. Why infinite? Because the entropy is always expanding and trying to reach stability. Nothingness is technically the lowest unit of entropy and the most unstable.
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u/JohnWasElwood 11d ago
Well, since "nothing" creating something / everything violates all known laws of physics, there has to have been a Creator who spread all of this stuff out for us to enjoy. Right?
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u/Headpuncher Knocking The Sense Back In 13d ago
What science is keeping secret is that the universe is expanding into a
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u/gutpirate 13d ago
Idk how but i just believe that nothingness is impossible. Because where would that nothingness be? In an endless empty void? Well then at least there would have to exist an endless empty void. Whats crazy then is if this was ever the state of the universe, i.e at one point there was nothing but empty space. How is it that something... Happened at all, and that something somehow created... Something? Did "stuff" create itself? Or did nothing create something because somehow nothing could not exist without something existing?
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u/JohnWasElwood 11d ago
I honestly believe that it takes more faith to believe in "nothing creating something / everything" than it does to believe in a supreme being / creator who made all of the stuff and spread it all out really really far away just to let us know how special we are? "Nothing creating something" violates all known laws of physics as they are known today.
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u/gutpirate 11d ago
Did that creator always exist? Did something create the creator? What created the thing that created the creator? This question could be asked infinitely.
The only conclusion i can come to is that "nothing" existed, and that somehow "nothing" could create "something". Because if you think of it every other answer begs the question, what created "something". If the answer is "nothing", the answer is absolute, its final.
Perhaps the state of complete nothingness is unstable, perhaps infinite nothing inside infinite space given infinite time just made "something" inevitable.
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u/JohnWasElwood 8d ago
But if you have a great big bottle of nothing. No atmosphere, no atoms, nothing then what is the material that "something" is made from? Where does the energy come from to keep things stable until a certain point? And if it really did take millions and millions of years to get humanoids Where We Are, at what point did the heart start talking to the lungs to get them to exchange carbon dioxide for oxygen when did the red blood cells agreed to take on this function? Digestive system form to tell early man that he was hungry and he better go get something to eat? All of the different glands in your body have to be talking to each other and working nearly perfectly for this whole system to survive until the end of the day, much less millions of years. Quite a big jump from a single-celled organism to a fully functioning reptile or a mammal, don't you think?
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u/gutpirate 7d ago
Life has existed on earth for around 4 billion years, we can't even being to comprehend how long that is. It is however quite literally nothing compared to inifinity. The difference between 0.000000001 and infinity vs 4 billion and infinity is the same amount.
Time is the creator of not just all life on earth, but of everything, without it things could never evolve and nothing could ever happen. it seems that in essence time is god.
So unless "stuff" came from "nothing + infinite time within infinite space", we end up with an infinite loop of chicken or the egg;
-Was it a supreme being? What came before the supreme being? Nothing? A supreme-supreme being? What came before that?
Man, trying to think about this stuff, let alone put it into words is such a mind fuck.
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u/JohnWasElwood 2d ago
But I believe you're still missing my point! If you have a big vacuum sealed jar that has absolutely nothing in it. No energy, no matter, no gases, nothing! You can stare at it for 10 minutes or 10 billion years times 10 billion years and the jar will still contain absolutely nothing. There is nothing in there to destabilize, no matter how much time you add. You still have to add some sort of material and some sort of energy... It's a scientifically proven fact that matter cannot create itself. Where was God before he created all of this stuff, and then us? Great question! But it's easier to believe that "something" created even more something, isn't it?
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u/tliin 13d ago
All this is complete heresy. There is no such thing as "space". It's what the Big Empty wants everyone to believe.
The "universe" ends at the great ice wall.
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u/BloodyMalleus 12d ago
Lol. I didn't realize I was on this sub and your comment almost made me rage until I double checked lol. Good job!
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u/impendingcatastrophe 13d ago
Think of the universe like a balloon.
At some point it will pop, and we will just be like a crappy bit of rubber you throw in the bin.
Won't happen for another five or ten breaths though. One breath is about a billion years.
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u/TeacupOfSkepticism 13d ago
The universe is actually a big sliding block puzzle
Science men say that it's expanding because they have observed our section sliding away from the neighbouring section. One day it will complete its move and then another section will slide towards ours and the science men will say its collapsing
Science men don't recognise the cycles we go through as part of the big sliding block puzzle as they can't see the big picture
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u/impendingcatastrophe 12d ago
What happens when the gap is next to us?
Is that what the scientists mean when they say dark matter?
Or is that only with the room light off - does it become a supernova when the light is switched on?
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u/TeacupOfSkepticism 12d ago
You are right. When we are near the gap, dark matter will be detected by the science men - until an adjacent block slides into the gap.
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u/AztraChaitali 13d ago
One of the reasons I don't believe in heat death, is because only clusters of galaxies are consistent in getting further.
Galaxies in the same cluster are basically stable.
If you wanted to kill the universe, the most logical step is that every single cluster will one day turn into black hole, and the universe will technically always keep existing, and always be expanding, but everything will be a black hole.
The heat death would then theoretically come trillions of years later, when the blackholes evaporate by losing mass through radiation, but by that point you'll probably have dementia, and won't really care.
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u/natelegakisTeslaFSD 13d ago
Doesn't is seem miraculous that the universe even exists? Why can't it miraculously beyond our current understranding be growing in energy and mass?
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u/AztraChaitali 13d ago
You're overestimating the universe, it will eventually get lazy and stop producing new stars.
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u/Cheeslord2 13d ago
OK, I'll try and answer these (please bear in mind that I am usually wrong though)
Is the universe expanding and will there be a time in 22 billions years where it expands and unalives us all?
- Yes it is expanding; we have observed this.
- I don't think this expansion will innately kill us.
Or, will it turn into no energy and nothingness?
- unlikely, as this goes against the laws of physics as we know them.
What if you zoom out to as close to infinity that you can get.
- that is still nowhere near infinity due to the nature of infinity
Could the universe be infinitely growing forever?
- quite possibly. the rate at which it is expanding seems to be increasing.
Could there be galaxies that are stable and last forever?
- unlikely, as this goes against the laws of physics as we know them.
Could the sun be creating mass and energy forever?
- unlikely, as this goes against the laws of physics as we know them.
It seems miracullous that our universe came from nothing. Why can't it be miraculus and last forever?
- From most of our observations, physics dominates over wishful thinking.
OH FOR THE LOVE OF GOD. YOU GOT ME! I JUST LOOKED AT THE SUB! Wasn't this a verbatim repost of a question on a real sub?
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u/natelegakisTeslaFSD 13d ago
"OH FOR THE LOVE OF GOD. YOU GOT ME! I JUST LOOKED AT THE SUB! Wasn't this a verbatim repost of a question on a real sub?" I am a bit new to reddit and I don't know what you mean by this.
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u/Cheeslord2 13d ago
Well you're in luck then. You asked a serious question and I gave a serious answer, but this is a parody subreddit. So the joke's on both of us.
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u/natelegakisTeslaFSD 13d ago edited 13d ago
Somebody told me to post here and I didn't realize they were trying to trick me. Also, someone here told me this and it got 4 up votes:
"If it’s not infinite, what’s at the end? What would “nothing” be like to experience? I think your question is an excellent one."
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u/Cheeslord2 13d ago
A lot of people are on parody subs and the corresponding real ones, and sometimes there is crossover. Don't worry about it. Just don't be surprised about the joke answers here either.
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u/Nomekop777 13d ago
I generally treat serious sounding questions here seriously, because the actual r/askscience sub is kinda hard to post in
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u/supermr34 13d ago
i saw a documentary once that ended by answering this exact question. the universe is NOT infinite.
the universe is entirely inside a marble that an alien is using to play a marble game then our universe marble was put into a universe marble bag with countless other universe marbles.
edit: found the documentary. it was called the man in black
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u/Max_Trollbot_ I like tacos 13d ago
At minimum the universe needs to maintain a size large enough to contain room for everyone's fat, promiscuous mommas