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Infinity means infinite copies of you
The wall
Take the first outcome. People understand things through contrast: heavy because they have felt light, hot because they have felt cold. So the mind demands to know what lies on the other side of the wall where the arrow stops. It cannot be blackness or a void, because those exist, and any description of it exists too, so what lies beyond cannot be defined.
No wall
Then take the second outcome, a universe with no wall. An infinite universe implies that everything in it repeats an infinite number of times, with endless variations. That means infinite versions of this very conversation exist, including one where the phone is turned upside down, and infinity cannot be solved for without that being true.
One of the two has to be the case, yet nobody has access to the answer.
Why would an infinite universe repeat itself?
Physicist Max Tegmark laid out the argument in a 2003 Scientific American article. In any finite region, matter can be arranged in only a finite number of ways, because quantum physics limits how much information fits in a given volume. If space goes on forever with matter spread through it, every possible arrangement must then occur somewhere, and recur. His estimate put the nearest exact copy of our region at a distance far too large to write without stacking exponents.
Is the edge of the observable universe a wall?
The observable universe is the region from which light has had time to reach Earth since the Big Bang, and it measures about 93 billion light-years across. Its boundary is a limit on what can be seen, not a physical barrier. An observer at that boundary would see their own observable universe centered on themselves. Because space has expanded, the edge lies farther away than 13.8 billion light-years, the age of the universe in years.
How do astronomers test whether space is flat?
Satellites such as WMAP and Planck mapped the cosmic microwave background, the leftover light from about 380,000 years after the Big Bang. The sizes of the hot and cold spots in that map depend on the curvature of space. Planck's 2018 results found curvature consistent with zero within a fraction of a percent. A flat universe can still be finite if it is connected like a torus, so the measurement alone does not settle whether space is infinite.
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