If the universe is infinite — which current cosmology suggests is genuinely possible — then somewhere out there, beyond the part we can observe, there is an exact copy of the Earth, an exact copy of you, reading an exact copy of this sentence at exactly this moment, because in an infinite universe every possible arrangement of matter must occur not once, but an infinite number of times

The argument is a peer-reviewed prediction of inflationary cosmology, developed most thoroughly by the physicist Max Tegmark, then at the University of Pennsylvania, in a 2003 paper titled simply “Parallel Universes,” published in the conference volume Science and Ultimate Reality for the 90th birthday of John Wheeler. It runs as follows. The observable universe is [...] The post If the universe is infinite — which current cosmology suggests is genuinely possible — then somewhere out there, beyo