What would happen if we could travel…
Imagine a small group of men and women, dressed in spacesuits, ready for a great expedition: perhaps the most extreme expedition in history. As they buckle into seats in their spacecraft, they have no idea where it will take them, nor what they will experience, because their journey has an unknown destination. They are headed in a straight line away from Earth, travelling near the speed of light, to the end of the universe.
The astronauts, the spacecraft and the journey are not real; this is a hypothesis proposed by US Astronomy Professor David Kipping and his colleagues, to illustrate how difficult it is to understand and explain the universe’s deepest secrets. The imaginary journey would take the astronauts through strange experiences that are the logical consequences of the natural laws we know, our theories about the shape and size of the universe. And it takes us to the edge of what cosmologists know about the universe – and may lead where we least
