Your question is honestly more philosophical than astro-geographical.

The universe is expanding from the central point of the Big Bang. What's beyond its edge isn't really observable so we can't really know what physics or states of matter, if there are states of matter, or whatever or whatnothing there is out there.... we don't know.

We're as real as we perceive ourselves to be. Whether we ARE real, or just a simulation programmed into some deity's playground as a Grade 11 Science project and happening to have self-awareness and language and senses of touch, smell, and so on... that honestly doesn't really matter, because there's nothing we can do about it.

*shrugs, and goes on living.

There is no end that we can see and at the rate of expansion, when we do see it, it'll have moved again until the great heat death of the universe.

Think of our existence as a firework.

We're still in the explosion part.

As for why, well there isn't a why. We just are.

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>The universe is expanding from the central point of the Big Bang.

There is (or rather was) no central point of the Big Bang. The BB happened EVERYWHERE - your house, my house, Mars, the Crab Nebulae and every other single point in the universe. All of it - every single place - and all at once.

Conceptually this is almost impossible for humans to picture. Our everyday experience restricts our ability to see "expansion" apart from some sort of object growing larger from around a central point (like blowing up a balloon). But that's not how the universe expands (now and during the BB). Instead of thinking of an object growing larger, think about all the parts that make up the object spreading apart from every other part at the same time. You can even have an infinitely large thing expand in this way - everything in the infinitely large thing just moves away from every other thing.

Picture an infinitely large sheet of graph paper marked with a grid. Each point that marks the intersection of lines on the paper is exactly one centimeter away from each neighboring point of intersection. Then stretch the paper until all points of intersection are now two centimeters from each neighboring point of intersection. You've expanded the infinitely large sheet by adding space between all the already existing points. The expansion happened everywhere on the sheet - it doesn't have a central point (it's actually more correct to say that every point is the central point of expansion because every point looks like the central point since an observer at each point would see the entire sheet stretch away from the observer in all directions).

God, I feel like every day someone posts the same type of drivel on this sub.

These are questions that we will probably never be able to answer - we are an infinitesimal speck of dust in the vast universe. Why that should make you reason your existence doesn't really follow. As for 'Are we real'? I'm not even sure what that means. If you are not real then where did this question come from?

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Either it’s a teen who’s never thought of it before or some wicked pseudo-scientist who thinks they’re the first one to come across that line of questioning.

Or someone just hit the blunt and thinks they’re a genius lol

Hello u/BOTT__, your submission "What are we? Why are we?" has been removed from r/space because:

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