Outer Space-finite or no?

Question

stars are incredible

if finite - what then?

my cousin said "nothing" - i said whatis nothing, he said it's what your senses can't conprehend

i dunno, im stillthinking

Answer 1

I guess the concept of infinity is kind of difficult to grasp.

If infinite... there is nothing "else." There is no "other side," or "outside." Being infinite precludes boundaries... it has none.

If there were an else, or other side, then there would be a place where the infinite didn't exist... making it finite.

In mathematics where we're talking about concepts, there can be infinite concepts and ideas. But, in the physical world, if something is infinite, it doesn't stop.... ever.

A math professor once posed the question, "Which weighs more, infinite feathers, or infinite elephants?" The question is academic. If there were infinite elephants, there would be nothing else...no scales... no plants... no feathers... and no people to ponder the problem. The same would be the case if there were infinite feathers. The consensus of the class was that probably infinite elephants weighs more because when you add one elephant to the pile of elephants, it increases the weight of the pile a little more than if you added a feather to the pile of feathers. But the weight, just like the number of them would be undefined... infinite... there is no value that represents it.

Answer 2

The universe is finite, but space is infinite.

The big bang happened something like 13.7 billion years ago and since the speed of light is a limit that means the maximum size of the universe is on the order of 13.7 billion light years.

We have no idea what existed before the big bang. It could have been another entire universe, but it was more likely just empty space; nothing; the lack of anything. If you define space as the emptiness beyond then it probably goes on forever. Thanks to dark energy the acceleration of the universe is increasing so it is getting larger day by day, but it is still limited to the speed of light.

Since the speed of light is a limit and we haven’t been around for 13.7 billion years there is a part of the universe that we can’t see. The light wouldn’t have had time to reach us yet. Therefore the observable universe has a limit.

If it is possible to travel faster than the speed of light then we can change those limits, but currently no one has found a way to cheat Einstein.

Answer 3

i think that the universe being finite doesnt make sense, u cant run into a wall that stops u from going farther, and its certainly not 4 dimensional (u get the the end and u appear on the other side). i think that its infinite by my definition. the matter and energy certainly has a stopping point because it can only travel so fast. if u were somehow able to travel faster than the speed of light (which is impossible) u would eventually get to a point where not even light as reached yet, and there is true nothingness.

Answer 4

To us humans the universe is finite because we're trapped in three diminsions. Space however, is VERY infinite.