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Universal Remoteness: What the Multiverse Means About Us

Our Universe is vast and mostly empty. Even if many of the billions of planets we suspect are out there have life, most of the cosmos is uninhabitable, and those worlds are unreachable by any means we know. That’s just within our galaxy, which is one of about 100 billion in the part of the universe we can see (the “observable universe”), which itself is only part of a bigger universe, which may extend infinitely in space. Then there’s the possibility, arising as a consequence of several theories, that that universe is but one part of a multiverse. All these things understandably can lead to feelings of insignificance.

That’s the entry point : Is

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