For example, imagine a perspective where a lifetime is measured not in tens of years, but in billions of years, and traversing across galaxies is as easy as going from city to city for us. You could see the life cycles of stars, the formation of new planets, life, evolution… and truly appreciate the vastness of the universe. We, on the other hand, exist for such a vanishingly small amount of time on such a small little chunk of the universe.

It’s also limiting that we are experiencing time in a one-dimensional, collapsed manner. The past is continually fleeing from us and the future is nebulous… but that could easily just be our perception.

It’s like we’re stuck on a train, with only a rear window, traveling at a constant speed forever. We can always look back and see from where we came, but we have no idea how the track turns up ahead, or even if it will be running for much longer. How ignorant must we look to an observer who can see the track in its entirety? To something not bound by our limited perception of time, its idea of the universe would be quite different than ours.

But maybe it’s good that we suffer this “limited perspective” of ours. When you’re only around for less than a century, the only appreciable wonder we can experience in the universe is each other. The Earth, the stars, space, and time are not going to give a damn about what you or I do with the rest of our lives, but the people around us will.

Friends will come and go, love, hate, death… all complex and powerful forces that we, in our limited perspective, can nearly get a hold of and experience them as they change and evolve throughout our lives. Could somebody who can skip around galaxies on a whim really appreciate something as delicate and fragile as love?

So maybe we don’t have that limited of a perspective after all? Maybe the most impressive things to witness in the universe are the relationships and emotions we experience with others happening right here on this frail little blue marble spinning around one lonely little star…

But maybe the entire universe itself is infinite? It might seem so… with our lonely little asses whirling around one of a hundred billion stars in our galaxy… which in turn is just one of 125 billion or so galaxies we think are in the universe. And when the number of stars is something with more than 20 zeros after it, it seems like it might as well be an infinite universe out there.

But even unimaginably huge is nowhere near infinity. An infinite universe is one that either extends forever in time or in space– or both. But what-ever-the-hell exactly does that mean?

An Infinite Amount of Space

A universe with an infinite amount of space in it seems like it wouldn’t really be that big of a deal. But exactly what would take up all that space? Lots and lots and lots of shit to be sure. Anything and everything imaginable would be taking up that space. Just like in the infinite series of digits in pi you can find any arbitrary long sequence of numbers any arbitrary amount of time, you could come up with any imaginable physical entity (a person, a planet, a galaxy) and eventually, somewhere in the universe, it would exist.

In fact, if the universe were truly infinite in space, then somewhere there is somebody almost exactly like me on a planet almost exactly like Earth probably writing some shit blog entry like I am now. Within an infinite space, eventually at some point, all possible physical configurations would exist.

Another similar view is one of the many theories behind the nature of quantum mechanics: the many-worlds interpretation.

Typical Quantum Bullshit

If you know even a little about quantum theory, you know a) it is some counter-intuitively mind-boggling crap, and b) an outcome to any quantum experiment is not deterministic; rather there is some distribution of probability for various outcomes occurring. Although good ‘ol Einstein disagreed when he said “God does not play dice”, the countless experiments seem to refute this idea.

The many-worlds interpretation basically states that instead of the quantum wave function of a system (that random probability of outcomes) collapsing into a single state when we measure it, there are actually universes where every possible outcome exist. In other words… for every possible quantum state of every system, there exists a separate universe with that outcome.

For the classic Schrödinger’s cat example, the cat does not exist in the superposition of being both alive and dead, but there are at least two universes: one in which the cat is alive, and one in which the cat is dead.

In this sense, there could be an infinite number of universes… all with different outcomes to various quantum events. Imagine– every decision you’ve ever made in your life… there would be an entirely separate universe in which you chose something differently.

All in theory of course.

Whatever

So is the universe infinite? No clue. But if it is, then there are certainly some very weird consequences about the nature of our reality. Who knows, maybe there are an infinite number of you in alternate universes… living out every possible life you could live.

Or maybe it’s all just bullshit.