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halfanothersdozen t1_jc92zym wrote

Given infinite time we actually expect all particles in the universe eventually to spread out and collapse into nothingness, everything with structure and energy eventually pulled apart into flat uniform empty space.

The observable universe is actually relatively finite. We can only see, at best, objects that are a few dozen billion light years away from us now, but are rapidly receding away from us such that soon the light they emit will never reach us because the expansion of the universe means those galaxies are moving away from us faster than the speed of light.

So in theory maybe somewhere out in the non-observable universe, that is the universe outside of the realm of things we could ever possibly observe it's possible there are galaxies identical to ours, but within the observable universe that is basically impossible.

That is of course referring to matter in this universe. It's entirely possible that there are infinite parallel universes which could have exactly the same configuration as this one or be slightly different, but we have no way to observe those if they exist.

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