A representation of the different parallel “worlds” that might exist in other pockets of the multiverse. Image credit: public domain, retrieved from https://pixabay.com/en/globe-earth-country-continents-73397/.

Is there another ‘you’ out there in a parallel Universe?

Even if the Universe grows to infinity, there might not be enough space to hold all the possibilities.

“We are actually living in a million parallel realities every single minute.”
-Marina Abramovic

One of the most exciting and enticing topics to speculate about is the idea that our reality — our Universe the way it is and the way we experience it — might not be the only version of events out there. Perhaps there are other Universes, perhaps even with different versions of ourselves, different histories and alternate outcomes, than our own. When it comes to physics, this is one of the most exciting possibilities of all, but it’s far from a certainty. Here’s what the science actually says about whether this could be true or not.

Image credit: NASA; ESA; G. Illingworth, D. Magee, and P. Oesch, University of California, Santa Cruz; R. Bouwens, Leiden University; and the HUDF09 Team.

The Universe, as far as the most powerful telescopes can see (even in theory), is vast, huge and massive. Including photons and neutrinos, it contains some 10⁹⁰ particles, clumped and clustered together into hundreds-of-billions-to-trillions of galaxies. Each one of those galaxies comes with around a trillion stars inside (on average), and…