so the universe could be the 13.7 billion year old membrane of an expanding bubble and if you could look at it from a point outside it would look way bigger as a bubble does yet the bubble skin itself is only a few microns wide...
...and if the outer edge were expanding at a rate faster than the inside edge then it could account for the universe getting older and bigger and spacetime expanding at a different rate
Now if there were bubbles inside of bubbles as ripples in a spherical pond of singular nothingness then it could account for the multiverse and being dependent on initial conditions at the start of time then these universes could be identical in so many ways yet so different in some fundamental way...
the trick for us then would be to see where our universe is in relation to others in the overall succession of bubbles within bubbles and figure out how to get to the egde of the membrane of our bubble , analyse it, break thru it and see what's on the outside then travel thru that to get to the next one...
...I don't think black holes/worm holes can help us there cos they are universe specific to keep it expanding uniformly by shifting energy around to maintain a balance. The most it could do is get us to the singularity of nothingness at the edge or centre and we'd have to take it from there
BTW Sylas...
thanks for that explanation it has helped heaps. Just one thing though, if the visible universe is 27 billion light years wide does that mean 13.7 billion light years in any direction ( given a uniform spherical expansion ) from here or from the middle ???
...thanx