Claw marks in the frozen peas

Up All Night

Think about something tonight. Go out under the stars, and think about this.

When we point telescopes into space, we’re looking into the past. It’s old light their mirrors collect. What we see has already happened, and the light that shone on those events has been moving towards us at a hundred and eighty-six thousand miles per second. When we look at Alpha Centauri, four point seven light years away, we’re seeing it as it was a little over four and a half years ago. The further we look, the further back in time we go. If we could see across ten billion light years, the light we gathered would be the first light — the Big Bang.

But the universe is more than ten billion light years across. The other side of the universe, which physics already has early measurements for, is far away enough to constitute infinite breadth. We could travel at the speed of light for the remaining duration of the universe itself and still not get there.

In an infinite space, it turns out that science allows, and in fact cannot avoid, repetition of structures. In an infinite universe, there exists the significant mathematical possibility of an entirely replicated Earth, on our own timeline but separately developed.

Another Earth we’ll never see because it’s on the other side of the universe, past the ten billion-year boundary of our sight, far enough away for the mathematics to allow it to exist.

There could, in fact, be a ring of Earths around the edge of the universe, ten billion light years apart, all alone and living through the same days.

And you know what? It doesn’t matter what went wrong in your life today. Because up there, in the dark, somewhere past the limits of your vision —

— you got it right.

Warren Ellis, December 2003