IS THERE ANYTHING BEYOND THE UNIVERSE

It's one of the most compelling questions you could possibly ask, one that humanity has been asking since basically the beginning of time. What's beyond the known limits? What's past the edge of our maps? The ultimate version of this question is, what lies outside the boundary of the universe. The answer is....well, its complicated. To answer the question of what's outside the universe, we first need to define what exactly we mean by universe. If you take it to mean literally all the things that could possibly exist in all of space and time, then there can't possibly be anything outside the universe. Even if you imagine the universe to have some finite size, and you imagine something outside that volume, then whatever is outside has to be included in the universe. Even if the universe is a formless, shapeless, nameless void of absolutely nothing, that's still a thing and is counted on the list of all things-- and, hence is, by definition, a part of the universe. If the universe is infinite in size, you don't really need to worry about this conundrum. The universe, being all there is, is infinitely big and has no edge, so there's no outside to even talk about. The current width of the observable universe is about 90 billion light-years. And presumably beyond that boundary, there's a bunch of other random stars and galaxies. But past that it's hard to tell. But the universe doesn't need that outside perspective in order to exist. The universe simply is. It is entirely mathematically self-consistent to define a three-dimensional universe without requiring an outside to that universe. It could very well be that our universe does indeed have an outside. But again, that doesn't have to be the case. There's nothing in mathematics that describes the universe in such a way that demands an outside. If all this sounds complicated and confusing, there is no need to worry. The entire point of developing sophisticated mathematics is to have the tools that give us the ability to grapple with concepts beyond what we can imagine. And that's one of the powers of modern cosmology; it allows us to study the unimaginable.l