this post was submitted on 25 Sep 2024
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There is no outside, by definition.
We also don't know for sure wether it's infinite, since we can only see the "observable universe"
If we are considering "the universe" to mean the spacetime that we exist in, there could be an "outside," but we just don't know, and there's no indication of such an outside, or anything about what it would be like.
By way of infinite spacetime, yes, there is only a part of spacetime that we can observe, because the farthest part is moving away from us faster than the speed of light. I seem to recall there having been some estimations of how large all of spacetime is, observable and unobservable, and that it has a finite size.
That said, there does not appear to be a limit to the size of spacetime. Based on what is currently known, spacetime is expanding, the expansion is accelerating, and there is no limit to the expansion.
Honest question: if “nothing is faster than the speed of light,” then how could the universe be expanding faster than the fastest thing?
It took my awhile to get it until somebody put it this way. The objects aren't exactly "moving" apart from each other, rather space in between them is expanding. So instead of thinking of it like a bunch of objects in a line being pulled away from each other, instead imagine it like a bunch of vector based objects random placed on an infinite canvas - now rather than moving the objects at all, try to imagine instead reducing the scale of all of the objects equally. Now of course this isn't perfect, as really what is happening is kind of the opposite, as the objects remain the same but the space between increases, but the relationship is the same here. So nothing is exactly "moving" in relative space, but everything is still expanding. Thus this expansion can happen infinitely without anything breaking the speed of light.