why hasn't destiny reached the edge of the universe yet?

[Akai]

There is no "edge". Assuming that you could travel fast enough to circumnavigate the universe in a reasonable amount of time, if you left a certain place headed in what you perceived to be a straight line, you would eventually get back to where you started. ALL paths you can take are curved, because space itself is curved. If you were to actually go in a straight line, it would involve moving in more than 3 dimensions and you may in fact "leave" the universe.

[Trig]

My question is what is what is the universe expanding into, as it expands is it destroying something that came before us....

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

Trig,

My question is what is what is the universe expanding into, as it expands is it destroying something that came before us....

That is question that with current technology and technology that will be available to us for the foreseeable future that is unanswerable.

[Trig]

Until we can get to the edge of the universe and pass through whatever barrier we'll never know. Getting to the barrier might even be the easy part, getting through it I should imagine would be difficult given the amount of energy it could possibly contain...

[min min light]

If you leave the universe , what's outside of it? If you pass through a barrier, what's on the other side of the barrier? If space is curved, what's outside of the curve?

If space isn't infinite, it's contained by something - right? But it seems like space is always described as if it's got an "outside," which would automatically place it inside of something else.

Maybe it's impossible to imagine infinity for the same reason that it's impossible to imagine a brand new color - we have no point of reference. There's no way to describe a new color without falling back on the colors that already exist. "It doesn't contain red, yellow, blue, black, or white." What color would that be - there's no way to picture it.

[Energizer_Vs_ZPM]

I don't think destiny was heading for the edge of the universe. My guess is that it was either going to the centre of it (the big bang) or it was taking a path to test a theory of something or other.

I also think it was carrying a payload of some sort behind the eyes at the front of the ship that were clearly closed with retractable shutters. What that payload is I have no idea but its clearly been carrying it for millions of years without using it.

EDIT: Thinking about it, maybe that is what the structure was... the theorised edge of the universe like a shell of some sort. Maybe destiny was carrying some form of laser behind those eyes so that it could break through this barrier and explore beyond it?

[KEK]

I don't think destiny was heading for the edge of the universe. My guess is that it was either going to the centre of it (the big bang) or it was taking a path to test a theory of something or other.

The big bang didn't happen at the "centre" of the universe, there's almost certainly no such thing, it happened everywhere. The speck that the universe started as was the universe in it's entirety. It's expanding at the same rate everywhere.

[Energizer_Vs_ZPM]

Yet to expand, it has to expand from somewhere which would mean there is a centre.

Think about what you just wrote - you've just contradicted yourself.

[Quadhelix]

Yet to expand, it has to expand from somewhere which would mean there is a centre.

Wrong. When we talk about space expanding, we are not talking about galaxies moving apart, but rather something completely outside our everyday experience.

In general relativity, the distance between two events or objects can be distorted by, for example, the presence of a massive object. When we talk about the universe expanding, the cause is not that the galaxies are all moving away from a specific point in space, but rather that the nature of distance is being distorted so that two galaxies that are not moving away from one another are still getting farther apart.

One analogy used to explain this is comparing the entire universe - all that we know exists - to the surface of an inflating balloon. If there were two objects glued to that balloon, they would get farther away from one another even though they are not moving across the surface of the balloon. The important thing to remember is that the inside and outside of the balloon are not real, but are rather flaws in the analogy.