Space and its Infinite Parallel Worlds

If you were to head out into the cosmos, traveling ever farther, would you find that space goes on indefinitely, or that it abruptly ends? Or, perhaps, would you ultimately circle back to your starting point, like Sir Francis Drake when he circumnavigated the earth? Both possibilities—a cosmos that stretches infinitely far, and one that is huge but finite—are compatible with all our observations, and over the past few decades leading researchers have vigorously studied each. But for all that detailed scrutiny, if the universe is infinite there’s a breathtaking conclusion that has received relatively scant attention. 

It is quite possible that in the far reaches of an infinite cosmos, there’s a galaxy that looks just like the Milky Way, with a solar system that’s the spitting image of ours, with a planet that’s a dead ringer for earth, with a house that’s indistinguishable from yours, inhabited by someone who looks just like you, who is right now probably reading this very article and imagining you, in a distant galaxy, just reaching the end of this sentence.

And there’s not just one such copy. In an infinite universe, there are infinitely many. In some, your doppelgänger is now reading this sentence, along with you. In others, he or she has skipped ahead, or feels in need of a snack and has switched on to some other page. In others still, he or she has, well, a less than felicitous disposition and is someone you’d rather not meet in a dark alley.  And you won’t.

These copies would inhabit realms so distant that light traveling since the big bang wouldn’t have had time to cross the spatial expanse that separates us. But even without the capacity to observe these realms, we’ll see that basic physical principles establish that if the cosmos is infinitely large, it is home to infinitely many parallel worlds—some identical to ours, some differing from ours, many bearing no resemblance to our world at all.

En route to these parallel worlds, we must first develop the essential framework of cosmology, the scientific study of the origin and evolution of the cosmos as a whole. The possibility of the existence of parallel worlds promises an exciting proposition for the scientists and astronomers alike. Only time will tell if such things really do exist and if they do then is there a way to enter and exit such worlds.

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