Gospel & Universe 🔭 The Sum of All Space
The Outer Reaches 1
All of Space - Universes
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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.
The notion of astronomical infinity has deep agnostic ramifications. The concept of infinite space isn’t a prerequisite for agnostic doubt, but it does gives doubt its largest scope, just as the exploration of foreign cultures and philosophies made Enlightenment thinkers like Voltaire and Montesquieu question the overwhelming importance of Europe. Montesquieu’s Persian Letters (1721) takes a crack at Europe from different imagined Persian perspectives, while Voltaire’s Micromégas (1752) goes a step further by having 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).
Using astronomy in this way as a jumping-off point to explore the largest context of doubt, 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 cluster, 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 sace. 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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Universes
This subdivision of outer space requires swapping 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 an agnostic, 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 extended 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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Next: 🔭 The Outer Reaches 2
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