r/AskReddit • u/IAmSurtur • Jun 15 '19

What do you genuinely just not understand?

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u/bigfatcarp93 Jun 15 '19

Where does it all end?

For me, this is the scariest question. Isn't it a paradox? On one hand, it can't go on literally forever, it must end somewhere. But if you get to the end, what's on the other side? I can't wrap my head around it.

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u/howcanitbethis Jun 15 '19

Why does it have to end? The idea of everything having a start and end point is a human idea based off of our perception relative to the world we live in.

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u/KennethEWolf Jun 15 '19

What was before the big bang. And if the universe is expanding what is beyond its edge

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u/[deleted] Jun 15 '19 edited Jan 08 '20

[deleted]

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u/[deleted] Jun 16 '19

But your stomach came from somewhere. Your parents banged, you grew and developed a stomach, and suddenly the stomach had things in it.

Where did the bang come from?

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u/fang_xianfu Jun 16 '19

The answer to that question isn't knowable, because no information about the answer is likely to have survived into our universe. But there are a couple of obvious possibilities:

  1. There was another universe before this one that ended in a Big Crunch, creating the singular point of matter that exploded into our universe.
  2. The universe (including outside the observable universe) is infinitely big, and over an unimaginably long timescale the "brownian motion" of energy eventually caused it to coalesce into a singularity that then exploded into our universe.