From a bird’s-eye view, the cosmos would appear riddled with innumerable widely separated regions, each being the aftermath of a portion of space transitioning out of the inflationary burst. Our realm, what we have always thought of as the universe, would then be but one of these numerous regions, floating within a vastly larger spatial expanse. If intelligent life exists in the other regions, those beings would just as surely have thought their universe to be the universe, too. And so inflationary cosmology steers us headlong into our second variation on the theme of parallel universes.
Inflationary theory
