On a tiny speck suspended amid the great black abyss of space exists everything we have

ever known and possibly will ever know.

Every person that has ever existed, every thought that has ever been thought, every love

affair, every war, every lie, every kiss, every piece of music that has ever been

written, and every glimmer of a future not yet realized.

All of it.

That tiny speck is of course earth, home to us and everything that makes us us.

But it's estimated there are roughly 10,000 stars in the universe for every grain of

sand found on our planet, itself only one of over a billion planets in our galaxy.

That galaxy, the Milky Way, is one of two trillion galaxies in the observable universe,

an incomprehensibly vast space, 93 billion light years from end to end.

The rest of the universe that we can't yet see could be anything from 150 to 250 billion

trillion times bigger.

In 1981, Alan Garth of Stanford University proposed the theory of cosmic inflation, the

idea that the nascent universe passed through a phase of exponential expansion and has been

continually expanding ever since.

Is the universe vast but finite with opposite ends, or is it something else?

From as yet unquantifiable, non-uclidean space, with wraparound properties like a game

of Pac-Man, we're travelling so far in one direction, eventually brings you back to

where you started, or is the entire universe as we know it, just the inside of a black

hole, existing inside a whole other universe, or inside an infinite number of other possible

universes for that matter.

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