new earth ? old earth ????

[snowball2]

how is this for a theory ? and is it plausible?
we look so far into space with our telescope that we can actually see earth as it was millions of light years ago!!
ie:- we look right around the universe in a massive arc and see our own planet !!
makes you think eh EH !

[jake-the-peg]

It depends whether you actually think you could really see the Earth or whether you're talking figuarively.

With the scale of the universe it's hard enough to see something the size of the Earth a few light years away let alone at the sort of distances we're talking about.

However the principle is sound - it's the old open or closed universe question and it depends really on whether there is enough matter in the universe to curve it around on itself.

If you think of the old "Asteroids" game. A space ship went off of one side of the screen and appeared on the other. Now that was 2 dimentional-If you think about what sort of 3 dimentional shape would give you that behaviour you might just be able to see that it's a torus - that is a bagel type of shape.

Now our Univers is 3 dimentional so the "shape" of a universe like that would be a 4 dimentional "hyper bagel" if that's a bit much to get your head around have a look here:
http://www.sensable.com/industries-video-galle ry.htm

If you scroll down to the bottom the one before last is a 4d Torus video it is about 13MB but that's quite small for a Universe.

[nightmare]

A light year is a unit of DISTANCE, NOT, repeat NOT, time.

[Llamatron]

As we look out into space we're actually looking back in time. What if the Universe is, as has been suggested, a big four dimensional donut only it's not as big we think. So when we look out into deep space we're actually looking back on our own region of space as it was millions of years ago. The further out we look the further back in time we're looking at ourselves.
We just end up looking round and round in circles but because of the time differences between each turn everything looks different enough for us not to notice.

Being completely ignorant of the science it all makes perfect sense to me.

[jake-the-peg]

We know that we're not looking at ourselves in a smaller universe because the red-shift of the objects that we

[jake-the-peg]

Sorry I'll say that again.

the red shift in the spectra of the objects that we can see shows them to be that far distant and distinct objects.

We see "duplicates" due to gravitaional lensing splitting the light so I think we'd spot it if we were looking at an early copy of ourselves

[Llamatron]

Ok, if you say so.