I've been saying it all along ...

Back in the '70s I made my short-lived stab at going to college and one class that I took and was really interested in was Astronomy, and my interest in the subject and amateur practice of it goes on today. But, one thing that stuck in my craw that I vividly remember from that class was the teacher's unwillingness to entertain a discussion of infinity. To me it was and still is absurd that he thought that it was meaningless speculation to think that given that infinity is, well infinite, that there might be and probably are many instances of universes that exist throughout the cosmos, each expanding, living and dying on their own. (Of course the word "universe" is a misnomer for these conglomeration of space, galaxies, dust. But never mind that. I think that there are some cosmologists who have come up whit the term "multiverse". )

Here is an article that I came across yesterday from the Guardian, One Big Bang, or were there many? that posits that my youthful speculation may not have been so far off.

The universe is at least 986 billion years older than physicists thought and is probably much older still, according to a radical new theory. The revolutionary study suggests that time did not begin with the big bang 14 billion years ago. This mammoth explosion which created all the matter we see around us, was just the most recent of many.

So there, closed-minded-college-teacher-who-tried-to-stifle-my-curiosity!