What is SPACE?

Much about nothing

By C. Warren Andreasen

(revised 6/22/21)

The question has long bothered me; What is Space? What is the universe expanding into?

By “space” I am referring to a case where all matter has been removed, or does not exist, it is ‘pure’ raw space… what is it?

I think if I were able to take a spaceship and travel beyond the edge of the universe and fill a container with pure, empty ‘space’ and bring it back to a laboratory on Earth, what would we find? (nothing)

The expanse, how far does it extend and what is at the end?

I finally came up with some answers:

The first revelation is that ‘space’ as we think of it, does not exist. It has zero mass, zero energy, zero anything, it is truly nothing. Nothing cannot exist.

Space is like darkness… darkness does not exist, it is not a thing. Darkness is what is left if all light is removed. Light is a thing, it has energy, is visible, light can be created. Dark simply means there is no light. Darkness cannot be manufactured or created, and in fact does not exist, it is simply the result of lack of light. If you could travel beyond the edge of the universe into the ‘nothing’ void you would find absolute darkness. You might as well be blind as outside of your spaceship is nothing, and unless you bring your own light you would not even be able to see your hand, or spaceship (from outside of your spaceship). No need for windows because if you have them, they might as well be painted over with flat black paint. There is ‘nothing’ to see.

Empty space is truly nothing, it is simply the lack of ‘something’. Position wise there is no reference unless it is referenced to something that does exist so movement is meaningless. There is no reason to move, or even tell if you are moving. Finding the way back to the universe would be a challenge

Beyond the edge of the universe there is truly nothing, until the universe expands into it. There is no end to the expanse because it does not exist until something is created, or expands into it. Like light makes darkness disappear, so mass and energy make ‘nothing’ disappear, You cannot measure or test “nothing”. ‘Nothing’ cannot exist because it actually is nothing, the total lack of ‘something’.

You might say that our entire universe is no more than a created bubble with nothing outside of it.

There was an episode of Star Trek Voyager that dealt with this concept however it was so flawed, on so many levels, as to be irrational. In their void it was inhabited by a humanoid species that had bodies with arms and legs and even eyes. They had technology with spaceships. Never considered were questions of; what do they eat, where does it come from? What material did they use to build their spaceships and where did it come from. Why have eyes when there is no light, and on and on it goes. Where do they get their energy? One thing they did get right though, there was no sense of movement and outside of the ship it was absolutely dark. The ship became a prison.

I won’t try to explain where God is, however He would have to be outside of the universe since He existed before the universe was created by Him. Clearly there are different planes of existence, different dimensions as it may well be. Surely a Spirit World exists. Outside of our universe time does not exist. Mathematically it can be demonstrated that time is part of the universe, part of what was created. We cannot comprehend lack of time, so I won’t attempt to go there except to say God is outside of time. Besides I have another paper about time that is available here.

A side note is that this ‘nothing’ principal holds true for temperature. Cold does not exist, it is simply the lack of heat. We get cold by removing heat, we cannot create cold, we can only add or remove heat energy. True space is absolutely dark and absolute cold because there is no energy to make it otherwise.