Did Another Universe Exist Before Us? | Unveiled

Did Another Universe Exist Before Us?

For decades, now, popular scientific consensus has held that the universe is around 14 billion years old, and that it can be dated back to one specific origin point: what many call “the Big Bang”. But, after years of research, we’re still debating what the Big Bang really was, how it occurred, and whether something like it could ever happen again? And, also, is it really true that before this flashpoint, there was nothing at all?

This is Unveiled, and today we’re answering the extraordinary question; did another universe exist before us?

The universe today is filled with cosmic microwave background radiation, or CMB; radiation which is uniform in every direction and is just less than 14 billion years old, proving that the universe came into being just less than 14 billion years ago - with CMB held as the residue of that initial explosion (or event) – the Big Bang. Generally speaking, the Big Bang was a monumental explosion (or event) triggering the universe to rapidly expand within the first second of its life… and today we can prove that it’s still expanding, thanks to redshift. But our current levels of understanding only prompt more questions about the birth of the universe and its eventual death. Nothing lasts forever, and as we’ve grown to realise the likelihood that not even the universe is eternal - that it won’t just go on and on and on - we’ve also called into question many previous cornerstones of science, including Albert Einstein’s Cosmological Constant. Now, the theory of universal expansion is the widely accepted one.

But expansion still leaves us with questions on exactly how and when and why the universe will end. The Big Rip theory says that eventually, it will get so full of dark energy that it will literally burst at the seams and be torn to pieces. The Big Crunch says it will someday collapse in on itself to form another immense singularity like the one thought to have caused the Big Bang. And there are other ideas, too, including the Big Chill or “Heat Death”, but none truly account for the beginning of everything there is. The universe can’t have just appeared out of nowhere because of the First Law of Thermodynamics which says that energy cannot be created or destroyed. In other words, all the energy that makes up the universe today has to have also existed at the point of the Big Bang and supposedly before the Big Bang in some form. It’s arguably the biggest, most fundamental problem in all of science. Enter; Bouncing Cosmology.

While a “Big Bounce” sounds a whole lot friendlier than a “Big Bang”, it’s not necessarily all that different. The Big Bounce theory doesn’t really disagree with the Big Bang; it more builds onto it, to try to answer certain problems - including those issues around the apparent “creation” of energy. For supporters of the Big Bounce, the Big Bang’s initial singularity does potentially still exist and still explodes to create the universe… but another universe existed before it, which collapsed into that same singularity. In this way, it’s as though the universe is breathing… expanding and contracting over billions of years but rearranging all of its matter every time it completes a cycle.

If the theory’s correct, it means that the same thing could happen again when our universe ends; that all the matter we’ve ever known is pulled together into another infinite point, ready to expand outwards again. It turns what we thought we knew on its head, pitching our reality right now as not only what exists after the Big Bang, but also what exists before another, future Big Bang… A future event which could, in time, lead to other intelligent species quadrillions of years in the future wondering what came before their reality was born - none the wiser to us or anything else that we know about! Equally, if the Big Bounce holds up, it’s then probable that there were infinite universes before ours, as well as infinite universes that come after. It may seem as though our reality has existed for an almost incomprehensible time in itself, but it’d actually be just one of endless realities in a Big Bounce world. In this model, the universe is eternal.

The good news is that if the Big Bounce really were to happen - if it really did dictate how and when our particular version of the universe ends - then it’s definitely not going to happen any time soon. In this version of cosmological events, the universe would have to contract (rather than expand) for a new singularity to form. It’d be as though universal expansion had hit reverse, meaning we’d suddenly see blueshift rather than redshift in distant stars – to show how the furthest-away objects were now getting closer. If the universe’s rate of expansion is anything to go by, then this process of contraction could take billions of years to complete!

The Big Bounce isn’t the only theory which implies another universe before our own, however. While a lot of ideas about the birth of the universe centre on a singularity like one found in a black hole, there’s also the idea that everything we’ve ever known came from a white hole, instead. A white hole is the inverse of a black hole; a point in space so repulsive that nothing can enter it and it ejects matter at a spectacular rate. Crucially, white holes haven’t been observed or proven as of yet, but their existence is mathematically sound, meaning they at least could exist… after all, the now accepted black holes were only mathematically theorised before they were actually discovered in the 1970s! Regardless, some think that the Big Bang could have actually been (or perhaps was influenced by) a white hole ejecting matter. If that’s true, then there may well have been universes birthed in the same way before our own - or even being born in the same way right now!

Similarly, we also have various multiverse theories, with some suggesting that our universe exists in a “bubble” alongside endless others all brought to life by Big Bangs of their own - all operating on an even larger plane of existence we don’t yet have a name for. For some multiverse supporters, it even means that black holes throughout our universe - which endlessly consume matter - could be burgeoning universes of their own, or gateways into parallel worlds. Unfortunately, from our point of view, anything that goes into a black hole is almost certainly destroyed, so even if this particular strand of the multiverse theory were true, we’d likely never be able to prove it.

Finally, there’s arguably an even stranger theory out there about what could have existed before the Big Bang: the “anti-universe.” This is the idea that the Big Bang was a beginning point for us but the end point for another; a mirror-image inversion of our universe, running backwards… or even that both our universe and the anti-universe started at the same time, but split off in different directions! The anti-universe in the theory would be somewhere where anti-matter is the norm rather than regular matter… with an abundance of antiprotons rather than standard protons… and, strangest of all, where time would travel backwards. The same universal contraction that created our hypothetical Big Bounce singularity would be the explosion at the beginning of the anti-universe, and vice versa. It suggests either another universe before us, or another one beside us. Bizarre as this idea maybe sounds, it’s one of various attempts to propose a unified “theory of everything”, to reconcile the many differences and problems in physics.

While nothing has been even close to conclusively proven, it’s scientifically possible (and arguably even plausible) that another reality at least something like this one existed before us… and might well come after us, too. The beginning and end points of the cosmos are among the trickiest concepts in all of science to nail down, but that’s why another universe could have existed before us.