Quote:Have you ever read Stephen King's book "The Gunslinger"? If not, there is a discussion that takes place regarding "size" and how the finite brain cannot comprehend the infinite, even though it thinks it can. Whenever I start into the realm of space and the like, I always think back to that. It's a very interesting perspective.

 

 

Quote:Why not? Nothing else we know of is infinite and each of the scenarios I presented is a scenario in which it's possible to be finite in size without having a definitive edge. Sure, you can pass the same place more than once but there is no actual edge. No one point on a sphere is the edge of that sphere. Think about it like this: You're stuck to/in the "skin" of a really big ball. You cannot get yourself off of this ball and you cannot get yourself through this ball. The ball, however, is flexible so you can raise or lower your elevation (bending space). Is there actually something beyond that ball?

 

This is, of course, purely speculation and off-hand discussion. I have no data or observations to support this idea. I'm also not arguing that it has to be finite, just that it shouldn't be discarded as a possibility because of an inability to perceive how everything can be finite.

I think Deacon's Stephen King argument is a much more "well-rounded" approach to this question. The farthest that Humans have ever traveled is the Moon. And even our deep space probes like Voyager 1 have only recently, just left the Solar System. And keep in mind that, that thing is travelling at a top speed of 38,610 MPH. And it's still not anywhere near as fast as some celestial objects out there. Heck, our entire Solar System is said to travel at a speed of almost 515,000 MPH.  And it still would take us millions, if not billions of years to travel across our own Galaxy. 

 

And to think that our Galaxy is one of only an "infinite" amount of Galaxies out there. We're still not entirely sure how big our Universe really is. That's why Astronomers only call our part of the Universe the "Observable Universe". I.E. only the parts of the Universe that we can see from Earth. We're not entirely certain if our Universe is the only Universe out there.

 

 

Basically the point is, is that the Universe is so big, that "Big" really isn't the best word to describe it. The Human mind simply cannot comprehend it.

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