Abstract

This article is based on the author’s book “The hypothesis of the fractal Universe: Background. Foundations. Twenty-four consequences”. The cosmic expansion makes it impossible to observe everything beyond the apparent horizon with a radius of about 13.8 billion light-years. Nevertheless, cosmologists quite often transfer the results of observations to the entire Universe, when speaking about the expansion of the Universe, the Big Bang of the Universe, etc. This extrapolation is implicitly based on the homogeneous Universe hypothesis: in homogeneous Universe its part is in fact similar to the whole. However, the observations of recent years speak of the fractality of the matter distribution in the entire volume of the observable world, which makes the fractal Universe hypothesis more plausible. In such a Universe, a part may differ significantly from the whole. The author includes in the fractal Universe hypothesis the assumption of its infinity, guided by two considerations. Firstly, for the fractal Universe, this assumption is the simplest possible one. Secondly, the infinite fractal Universe has zero global density, which removes the problem of its non-stationarity. Since the fractal Universe cannot either expand or contract, the observable expansion is experienced only by our Metagalaxy. Due to the dominance of gravity in metagalaxies with their giant dimensions, they are all non-stationary, constantly experiencing expansion and contraction. With the expansion, metagalaxies evolve, with the contraction, the results of evolution are destroyed. Arising at the regular stage of expansion of the metagalaxy, life each time starts from a blank sheet and disappears without living a trace when it contracts.