This week, Ben returns from Orlando with tales of theme parks, electric cars, Florida humidity, and some very large rockets. Steven celebrates a fantastic Lanterns finale before asking whether the universe is actually infinite, while Devon somehow turns a conversation about having nothing to talk about into a discussion of the 11th dimension. Naturally.

Real Life

Ben is back from Orlando, but before we get to theme parks and spaceships, we need to answer an important question: can you beat jet lag by changing your sleep schedule before a trip with a three-hour time difference? Ben tried it, and now we get to find out whether this was clever preparation or just voluntarily making himself tired ahead of time.

Once in Florida, Ben got the full Orlando experience. He spent some time driving a Polestar electric car and visited Epic Universe. He also hit Andretti Indoor Karting—which sounds increasingly like Dave & Buster’s after somebody turned the chaos knob all the way up—and explored the upside-down weirdness of WonderWorks Orlando.

Devon’s adventures stayed a little closer to home. He went laser tagging with his kids. Just his kids. Apparently, the day will eventually come when they abandon him and he’ll be left Home Alone. At least that gives him an excuse for a movie marathon.

Steven, meanwhile, finished Lanterns, and the finale was firing on all cylinders. The first season manages to tell such a complete story that a potential second season faces an interesting problem: where do you go from here without simply trying to repeat what already worked?

Future or Now

Ben’s Florida vacation inevitably turned into Today in Space when he visited Kennedy Space Center.

The first scientific observation: Florida is really freakin’ humid.

After recovering from that discovery, Ben checked out Launch Complex 39, the Vehicle Assembly Building, and some of the areas now connected to SpaceX and Blue Origin operations. There was also the launch simulator, because apparently looking at rockets isn’t enough—we need to pretend to ride one too.

The trip also adds to Ben’s growing collection of enormous pieces of spaceflight history. He’s now seen two Saturn V rockets, in Huntsville and Florida, with Texas still waiting on the list. He’s also seen two Space Shuttles: Pathfinder in California and Atlantis in Florida.

This Week in Space: Is the Universe Infinite?

Steven brings us one of those wonderfully simple questions that becomes less simple the longer you think about it: Is the universe infinite?

Measurements of the cosmic microwave background—the ancient light left over from the early universe—indicate that the universe is remarkably flat on the largest scales we can observe. It’s tempting to hear “flat” and immediately conclude “infinite,” but those aren’t necessarily the same thing.

As discussed in coverage from ScienceDaily and Universe Today, the observable universe could represent only a tiny portion of something much larger with curvature we simply cannot detect from our limited perspective. Stranger still, space might be flat while having a topology that allows it to wrap around itself.

In other words, you could theoretically have a universe with no obvious edge that still isn’t infinite in the straightforward way we normally imagine infinity.

And this is approximately where Devon starts talking about the 11th dimension. Because why stop at asking whether the universe is infinite when we can ask whether our entire universe somehow exists on the edge of a black hole in a higher-dimensional reality?

Jet lag, theme parks, Saturn V rockets, cosmic topology, and higher-dimensional black holes.

Just another week on Science Faction.