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by cygx 3535 days ago
The current assumption of the cosmological standard model is spatial flatness, which is compatible with the observations. In principle, space could still curve back on itself on a large enough scale, but assuming there's no big crunch coming, you'd have to go straight for a longer-than-infinite duration to come back to the place you started from.
1 comments

Longer than infinite?

What does a big crunch have to do with it? Maybe I don't know what a big crunch is... I currently think the big crunch is the idea that gravity will eventually coalesce all matter into a single point.

Longer than infinite?

In an expanding universe, objects can be separated by a cosmic horizon. Nevertheless, from the comoving perspective, they may very well still move towards each other - but without ever meeting up. However, if you extended conformal time beyond infinity, they would. That's of course not physically possible, so that particular comment was tongue in cheek.