The Double Refuge 🔭 The Sum of All Space
The Outer Reaches
All of Space - Universes - Hubble Volumes
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All of Space
When I wrote at the end of the previous page, at the core of everything, beyond the misty peaks and circling satellites, lie the enormous lattice-work of the gravity-bound stars, I really meant everything. Everything in the most general sense: omnis locus, Latin for all of space.
This everything includes the sun and its nearby planets, the Milky Way, our local galaxy clusters, and the thousands of galaxy clusters that spin and pulse in the totality of the known space we call the universe. This everything may also include whatever lies beyond what we think of as the known universe. Perhaps there are other universes, and other groups of universes, literally ad infinitum. This possibility is highly speculative, but not implausible.
I imagine six orders of space instead of the conventional four: 1: Solar systems, like our own solar system; 2. Star clusters, star groupings, & galaxies, like our Milky Way; 3: Clusters of galaxies, like our Virgo Supercluster; 4: Our universe, comprised of enormous and complex clusters of galaxies; the largest of these we presently call the observable universe, which I propose calling our universe; 5: Universe clusters, comprised of our universe plus another universe or other universes similar in magnitude to our own. There could of course be a grouping of numerous universe clusters, yet to give such a cluster a name would be to surround a speculative space with a larger speculative space; 6: The Allspace, comprised of everything there is in three-dimensional space. This may end up being what we think of now as our universe or it may include any number of universes. This may also include parallel spatial reams, alternate spatial realms, and other forms or fabrics of space that we don’t presently understand.
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The notion of astronomical infinity has deep agnostic and theist ramifications. The concept of infinite space isn’t a prerequisite for doubt or belief, but it does gives them its largest scope, just as the exploration of foreign cultures and philosophies was enhanced by a more detailed understanding of the globe during the Enlightenment. We can see this at both the geographical and astronomical level: Montesquieu’s Persian Letters (1721) takes a crack at European superiority from different imagined Persian perspectives, while Voltaire’s Micromégas (1752) has a giant alien from Sirius (the Dog Star) dismantle fundamental European notions of human importance.
Spatial infinity suggests that any claim to explain everything is doomed to failure, to provisional status, or to extreme limitations. Even if we found a set of universal constants or truths, there might be other universes with other truths. The extreme distances involved in infinite space suggest, even more than intergalactic space, that everything contains extreme differences in types and modes of existence, both in what each realm might understand by natural laws and in whatever might be understood by epistemology and ontology (systems of knowledge and being).
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Universes
Astronomical infinity requires that we swap the definite article for a possessive pronoun, changing the universe to our universe. It also avoids the notion of theoretical universes beyond our common four-dimensional space-time continuum. As a double refugee, I’m intrigued by the possibility of universes beyond our 4-D space-time continuum, just as I’m intrigued by Heaven or Krishnaloka. Yet even if these theoretical universes did exist, I’m skeptical that we could measure them here in our 4-D realm, given that by definition those other realms are theorized to exist in a subsequent or separate spatial dimension, that is, in a dimension which we can’t corroborate and in which we don’t exist. In this case, what can be theorized in math, physics, philosophy, or theology has yet to be realized in the here and now.
In A History of the Universe (2006), Henry Kong notes the similarity between these types of theoretical universes and religious universes:
Extreme multiverse explanations are therefore reminiscent of theological discussions. Indeed, invoking an infinity of unseen universes to explain the unusual features of the one we do see is just as ad hoc as invoking an unseen Creator. The multiverse theory may be dressed up in scientific language, but in essence it requires the same leap of faith. (Vol. 1: Complexity, p. 23)
Theoretical multiverses remain something else, that is, something apart from what we can measure in terms of our common space. They require a willingness (and an ability) to follow math and physics into highly theoretical realms, similar to the way that notions of Heaven or Krishnaloka require a willingness to follow theology into ideal realms. My notion of astronomical space on the other hand posits something more. That is, it posits something we could measure in terms of our present understanding of space and time.
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Hubble Volumes
In cosmology, a Hubble volume or Hubble sphere is a spherical region of the observable universe surrounding an observer beyond which objects recede from that observer at a rate greater than the speed of light due to the expansion of the Universe. The Hubble volume is approximately equal to 1031 cubic light years. […] the term is also frequently (but mistakenly) used as a synonym for the observable universe; the latter is larger than the Hubble volume. [from Wikipedia]
Locating another universe would probably require a Hubble-sized leap in technology. I use the phrase Hubble-sized leap as one might use quantum-leap, yet I also want to recall that Hubble was the first to verify other galaxies in 1923. Perhaps some day universe clusters will be revealed to us, just as the stars in Andromeda were revealed to Hubble.
While I imagine that other universes exist in the same space-time continuum as ours, I suspect that these universes are so far away that they don’t necessarily share all the things we take for granted in this corner of our galaxy. Our understanding of our own universe is just beginning. It’s barely a hundred years old. I’m not sure we can even make assumptions about the constants of the far-off galaxies that we can presently detect, let alone make assumptions about galaxy clusters or universes we haven’t even detected. The following is a cropped NASA image of MACS0647-JD, which “is a candidate for the farthest known galaxy from Earth and is at redshift of about z=10.7 or 13.3 billion light-years (4 billion parsecs) away. It formed 420 million years after the Big Bang. It is less than 600 light-years wide.”
“MACS0647-JD," from Wikipedia
A Hubble volume gives us a type of measure of the size of other universes we might find some day, although just as stars, solar systems, and galaxies come in different sizes, so other universes may differ in size. The notion of a Hubble volume is also helpful in that it reminds us that what we see is dependent on where we see it from. And, of course, the way we interpret what we see.
My position regarding other universes is even more precarious than that of the 9th century astronomer al-Sufi, who called Andromeda a small cloud, and who would need to have lived another millennium to fully understand that what he saw was in fact a far-off galaxy. We may have already seen some tiny dot or cloud of light — some blip, pulse, particle, or wave — that in a hundred or a thousand years we’ll know comes from a universe sextillions of gigaparsecs from Earth. The following Wikimedia image is of “the Andromeda constellation, from the 10th C. Persian astronomer al-Sûfi's Treatise of the fixed stars”:
Of course, it’s possible that we may never see anything like al-Sufi’s little cloud. Perhaps even in a million years, and from the perspectives of a billion alien life forms, such a thing will never be seen. The wonderful thing about practical space, however, is that this doesn’t mean another universe doesn’t exist. Unless we can verify that it curves in upon itself and that there’s nothing beyond the bent universe that we can see.
While the notion of universe clusters has no data to back it up, it nevertheless derives from two simple expectations. First, in every case, be it physical or intellectual, we find that there’s always something outside or beyond the case in point. In thought as in space. Whatever we see or imagine, we can see or imagine something beyond that. Second, why would we assume that the astronomical precedence of mind-blowing discovery stops precisely at the limit of our present detection?
To discount the possibility of universe clusters may be to think as we thought prior to Edwin Hubble and the 1920s, back when this galaxy seemed so vast that it simply had to be everything there was: The Milky Way, Via Lactea, Galaxías Kýklos, astronomical Goddess of Absolute Space. Hubble showed us that our galaxy wasn’t all there was to space, not in a million years. Today we see that our 100-400 billion stars need to be multiplied by hundreds of billions of galaxies to get a sense of the way our universe is populated by stars. This may be the tip of the iceberg: our universe may be an infinitesimal fraction of total space. Why would our universe be any different — any more absolute a framework — than the Milky Way?
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Next: 🔭 The Unknown Arcs of a Sphere