Stenger, Observable Universe, Entire Universe, Multiverse, Biverse

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In Victor Stenger's interesting book «God and the Multiverse» (although not central to it), the author remarks on Alan Guth's calculation from standard inflationary cosmology, that the "rest of the universe" beyond the approximately 46 billion light year-diameter sphere that is the observable universe (i.e. close enough that light has had time to reach here in the 13.8 billion years since the universe became transparent about 380,000 years after the Big Bang ....as seen from the Milky Way), is AT LEAST 10^23 times the size of the observable universe. That means something like 10^34 galaxies and 10^44 planets capable of sustaining carbon based life on their surfaces. A HELL of a lot of real estate.

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 "well-established inflationary cosmology implies that on the other side of our horizon lies a region containing at least 23 orders of magnitude as many galaxies as those inside, which arose from the same that produced our [visible] universe. It is likely to be many orders of magnitude greater. Our visible universe can be likened to a grain of sand in the Sahara desert." (GatM, p. 374).

Note that this has nothing to do with the "eternal Multiverse," which is also more or less implicit in current cosmological theory, or the phenomenon referred to as the biverse, whereby the most logical assumption of the consequence of the inflationary bubble from a Planck sphere at the moment of the Big Bang is that an essentially equivalent process also occurred in the opposite direction of time, creating a similar (though not identical) universe, possibly with a symmetrically inverse billion-to-one anisotropy of antimatter rather than regular matter, which exists, its space expanding like ours, only in the other temporal direction from the Big Bang.

Wrap your head around that, if you care to. 

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