5 Weird Theories About Space

This article is going to make your brain hum and probably hurt in equal measure. As much as humans like to think we’re advanced and knowledgeable when it comes to scientific fields and cosmological understanding, we’ve barely scratched the surface.

Not too long ago, we thought the Earth was flat, and even the great Albert Einstein’s ideas are now starting to look a bit outdated thanks to the bewildering world of quantum mechanics, which states that something can exist here, and here at the same time — but can’t explain to you how.

Today we’ve got five of the weirdest cosmological theories to tell you about, guaranteed to leave you scratching your head and questioning the very reality you’ve long believed to be true. Strap in — things are about to get very strange.

The Multiverse Hypothesis

One of the most intriguing, controversial, and plain mind-bending cosmological theories is the Multiverse Hypothesis, which suggests the existence of multiple universes beyond our own.

Now, bearing in mind that our own cosmos includes around 350 billion galaxies and the observable known universe spans somewhere in the region of 94 billion light years, the notion that this might be just a single speck in a much larger Multiverse is enough to make your head spin.

You might think this is a purely new, radical idea, but it originated from a few Ancient Greek philosophers, namely Leucippus and Democritus, in the 5th century — ideas that were gradually added to and expanded on over the coming centuries. The term ‘Multiverse’ was first used by American philosopher and psychologist William James in 1895, and the idea has gradually inched its way into the collective cosmological consciousness. However, it remains a deeply polarising idea.

It’s difficult even to start getting your head around the multiverse hypothesis. How can we even picture multiple gargantuan universes? One of the most common and probably easiest visual images to process is a children’s ball pit, where each ball in the pit is a different universe. Or perhaps billions of individual bubbles floating through a giant room is a better way to think about it.

Like everything else we will discuss today, there’s absolutely no evidence to suggest the multiverse theory is correct. Still, there are certain problems with current and established cosmological theories that might give it some weight.

Let’s start with the Big Bang. Most scientists, cosmologists, and just about everybody else, accept the theory that our universe was created thanks to a mighty explosion around 13.8 billion years ago. A trillionth of a second after the event, the universe was roughly the size of the Earth to the Sun but grew rapidly in the first few seconds — faster than the speed of light, according to some calculations — before slowing down, though it is still expanding.

That all sounds perfectly reasonable, but what existed before the Big Bang? One component of the multiverse theory is that our Big Bang was one of many that have occurred, with each setting off growth that eventually spawned its own universe. Another idea is that the Big Bang created the many bubbles that burst from it and have been evolving independently — possibly with their own physical laws and realities.

Proponents argue that this could explain the fine-tuning of physical constants and why fundamental laws are ideally suited for life to emerge. Suppose there is an infinite number of universes. In that case, there must also be an infinite number of atom and particle combinations — the overwhelming majority of which cannot support life, but the tiniest number can.

The Simulation Theory

Are we living in a computer program? If you think that’s wobbling into the strange and wonderful world known as lunacy, you might be right — then again, maybe that’s just how you’re programmed to think.

The Simulation Theory proposes that our reality, including the entire universe and everything within it, is nothing more than a computer simulation created by an advanced civilization or higher beings.

This might sound like a cosmic conspiracy theory straight out of The Matrix, but much of it has its roots in a paper published in 2003 by an Oxford Professor, Nick Bostrom, titled “Are You Living in a Computer Simulation?”. Though vaguely similar ideas were mentioned in ancient times in China, India, and Greece.

The Simulation Theory sounds utterly preposterous from the outset, and yet several leading figures in science have, at the very least, accepted that this isn’t a theory we should dismiss out of hand.

At the heart of the Simulation Theory lies the hypothesis that an advanced civilization, possibly far more technologically adept than ours, has developed the capability to create simulations of its reality. These simulations could be so intricate and lifelike that the simulated beings — us — within them might believe they live in a tangible, physical universe, unaware that it is all a digital fabrication.

Those supporting this theory point to the rapid advancement of virtual reality and computer simulations in our society. Of course, the likes of The Sims and Minecraft are still a world away from this, but isn’t it logical to believe that at some point, our computer game characters will become so advanced that they will essentially be able to think for themselves as humans do?

Knowing where to stop with this theory is difficult because it can begin to get fantastical. Are we actually the simulation of a master race that lived on Earth millions of years ago but evolved to the point where they don’t exist in the same way we do? Are we programmed participants in a game created by a single omnipotent player? Could that even be who some consider God?

Then there’s the idea of what is reality and for that, let’s look at a quote by theoretical physicist David Bohm:

“Reality is what we take to be true. What we take to be true is what we believe. What we believe is based upon our perceptions. What we perceive depends on what we look for. What we look for depends on what we think. What we think depends on what we perceive. What we perceive determines what we believe. What we believe determines what we take to be true. What we take to be true is our reality.”

White Hole Theory

If you thought the idea of black holes was a confusing mind-bashing theory, welcome to the world of white holes — where everything happens in reverse, and cosmology becomes even more bewildering.

A black hole is formed when a massive star exhausts its nuclear fuel and collapses under the force of its own gravity. This collapse creates a region in space with such intense gravitational pull that nothing, not even light, can escape from it. The immediate area around a black hole is called the event horizon, and anything that crosses the event horizon is trapped within the black hole, and from there, your guess is probably as good as mine.

One theory is that black holes act as wormholes linking different worlds or universes, perhaps even a multiverse superhighway if you wanted to start blending these theories. If that were the case, it would only make sense that there must be an exit to the wormhole. And since black holes never emit anything, it would only make sense — and I’m using that term very loosely — that the exit must be different to the entry — which is perhaps where white holes come in.

White holes can be considered the “time-reversed” versions of black holes, expelling everything rather than consuming it. While no direct evidence of white holes has been observed, they have captured the imaginations of scientists, science-fiction writers, and those wacky folk who tend to believe absolutely everything on the internet.

While this idea is very much theoretical, it was predicted by Einstein’s theory of gravity, although his notion of a singularity within a black hole where nothing could pass would seem to dampen the idea, along with its connection to wormholes. But who knows? Even Einstein’s theories are now being questioned by quantum mechanics. Are white holes the key to time travel or parts of the intricate fabric of space-time?

We’ll leave the white hole theory with one final mind explosion. While there is no evidence of white holes, one idea seems to fit the criteria. What if the big bang was the result of a white hole? What if everything that has been spewing from it for the last 13.9 billion years came from a completely different area or another time? We’ll just leave you to chew on that idea for a few seconds.

The Big Splat Theory

As discussed earlier, one of the principal problems the Big Bang theory leaves behind is what happened before this mighty eruption that created us all. What existed before life began, and what happened to what existed before life began?

The Ekpyrotic theory, also known by the far less eloquent Big Splat theory, is a cosmological model that suggests our universe was created through the collision of two higher-dimensional worlds, referred to as branes, themselves part of a much greater form that we simpletons can only dream of ever genuinely understanding.

Before we come to the Big Splat, let’s briefly look at the Brane Theory, which has quite a bit in common with the multiverse hypothesis. Brane theory, short for membrane, is part of the more extensive string theory and suggests that we live within higher-dimensional membranes floating through space or perhaps the larger multiverse.

We, humans, experience our reality through four dimensions; three visually, height, width, and depth, and another through time, which only goes one way. However, according to string theory, the universe operates with as many as ten dimensions, and different parts of our membrane experience different dimensions.

The universe we see around us would then consist of only a small membrane layer. Think of it as a single piece of paper within a larger stack — with some room between each piece. Therefore, each membrane is its own universe within its own reality governed by its own laws and motions.

So that’s a rough outline of membrane theory. The idea behind the big splat theory is that a universe is created when two of these membranes collide, which converts their kinesthetic energy into matter and energy, creating an eruption that sparks life into existence — the big bang. This intense inferno pushes the two membranes apart, and they begin accelerating away from each other.

However, another part of these theories is that the universe and its life are cyclical. This means that the two membranes begin to slow down, and eventually, the process is reversed, and they begin accelerating towards each other. When they finally meet, they smash into each other, and another big bang occurs. This creates two entirely different universes, almost certainly in a radically different form than what we have now, and the whole process begins again.

Messages from Faraway

Every few years, an excited ripple emerges from those tasked with scanning the skies for extraterrestrials, usually accompanied in the papers by rather dampening warnings not to get our hopes up. And they’re usually right.

Humans have been scanning the universe with a range of radio telescopes since the late 1950s and have so far found absolutely nothing. However, there have been some headline-grabbing false starts that we still can’t explain.

One of the most famous occurred in 1977 when astronomer Jerry Ehman, who was using the Ohio State University’s Big Ear radio telescope to search for possible radio signals coming from space, came across something extraordinary.

Dubbed the ‘wow signal’ after the single word Ehman wrote next to the findings, what he recorded that day was an intense signal coming from the Chi Sagittarii star system that lasted 72 seconds. Unfortunately, the signal was only ever heard once and has never been fully explained, though it did add some much-needed vigour to a SETI program that was beginning to flounder.

As technology has improved, so has our capacity to scan the night sky. Over the last couple of decades, there have been several promising leads, such as the Breakthrough Listen project that recorded signals coming from a small red star called Proxima Centauri, or signals coming from the star YZ Ceti and the rocky exoplanet that orbits it, called YZ Ceti b by the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array of telescopes in New Mexico.

One explanation frequently used to dismiss findings is the existence of pulsars, highly dense and rapidly rotating neutron stars, which are the collapsed cores of massive stars that have undergone a supernova explosion. Their rapid spinning gives the impression that they are blinking while beaming out intense electromagnetic radiation from their poles, like giant lighthouses.

And here’s where some of that weirdness comes in. There is a loose theory, still well out of the mainstream, that while pulsars are entirely natural, it’s not out of the realms of possibility that an advanced civilization could manipulate them to send messages to Earth — and perhaps even to use their waves as some kind of intergalactic highway that could push spacecrafts at much faster speeds than would be possible without them.

In a paper written in 2014 and published in New Astronomy, it was suggested that radio waves coming off pulsars could be encoded with information sent from a satellite orbiting nearby, or even more radically by constructing a scaffold around the pulsar and placing messages directly in front of emitting waves. They could then be used in reverse to listen to messages coming back to them from distant space.

It sounds like they’re stretching possibility to absolute breaking point, but after the theories we’ve gone through in this article, it might not seem so outrageous.

Key Takeaways

• The Multiverse Hypothesis suggests multiple universes exist beyond our own, with no evidence but intriguing explanations for cosmological mysteries.
• The Simulation Theory proposes our reality is a computer simulation created by advanced beings, with roots in ancient philosophy and modern science.
• White holes, theoretical counterparts to black holes, expel matter and energy, potentially linking to time travel or the Big Bang.
• The Big Splat Theory posits our universe was created by colliding higher-dimensional worlds, or branes, in a cyclical process.
• The ‘Wow! signal’ and other unexplained radio signals hint at potential extraterrestrial communication, though pulsars offer a natural explanation.

Sources

• Original Side Projects video: 5 Weird Theories About Space

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